Studies indicate that around 47% of people are annoyed if webpages take more than two seconds to load. People are believed to leave a website and won't return back to your site if it takes more than three seconds.
In this fast-paced world, your website also needs to keep up with the pace. People are always in a hurry and every second delay in load time will lead to reduction in conversion rates. This is why people choose reliable hosting providers like for their hosting requirements.
One of the major reasons behind websites losing potential customers is the website loading speed and performance. In this article, we'll look at the major factors that affect your website speed.
1. Web Hosting
One of the primary factors in causing a webpage to load slow is your hosting server. The hosting company or the type of server you choose for hosting your website will have a major impact on the speed of your website.
In case, you go for the wrong choice of opting a less powerful server, then your website and business will bear the brunt of the impact. Hence, it is quite imperative to make a thoughtful selection of a hosting server that will satisfy the requirements of your website.
For example, if your website contains a huge database and every page makes a lot of calls to the database, then you need to opt for a dedicated server than a shared server. When choosing a hosting server, it is always recommended to check for the following factors that include:
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Server Response Time: It is important to check for the time taken for a server to respond to a request made by the website. The Server Response Time (SRB) is generally measured using Time Taken to First Byte (TTFB). In other words, the total time taken for the first byte to receive from the server is TTFB. Generally, for a website with good loading speed should have a TTFB less than 200ms.
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Hardware: Next important factor in choosing the server is the kind of hardware it comes with. When compared to mechanical drives, SSD (Solid State Drive) is preferred for increase page speed and performance.
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Clients Per Server: If you are choosing a shared hosting server, then care should be taken the server is not overcrowded. Choose a server that comes with a lesser number of clients or websites hosted in that server. Overcrowded server can take a long time to respond than dedicated servers.
It's not hard to guess the impact of web hosting on speed, as a result, it's recommended to use companies like SiteGround which uses Google servers which is very fast considering websites like apple.com, youtube.com, gmail.com uses google servers for hosting. Even though you may get cheaper hosting like Bluehost which promises the same feature for comparatively less price, however, SiteGround is better than Bluehost when it comes to speed and overall performance. So, you should be careful before choosing a hosting that's 1-2$/mo less than their competitors.
2. Poor Coding Standards
Next major factor that create a big impact on the website speed and performance is poor coding standards and practices. Care should be taken by the development team not to add unnecessary blocks of code as it could hamper the page speed to a great extent.
Just by removing all the unwanted or dead code, line breaks and spaces in your code could show a significant difference in your website speed. If you are not a big fan of manual cleaning of your code, you can simply make use of several tools to fix issues and minify your code.
3. Server Location
Another major reason that could affect your page speed is the location of your server. Servers that are close to your location can serve you data quicker than server that are very far. If you opt for servers in other countries, it will literally mean that your connection needs to travel through many open networks to reach you. Hence, there is every chance your website site can decrease to a considerable level. Hence, it is always recommended to go for local hosting than going for overseas servers. One of the big problems of overseas server is some travel through undersea cables and could play a role in your website speed and performance.
4. Heavy Scripting
While JavaScript can make your website dynamic and quick, there are some downsides to it. Yes, making use of unnecessary scripting, sluggish CSS code can make your site load extremely slow.
Hence, care should be taken that any scripting content is added below the fold to address the issue. Once the browser doesn't see any scripting code other than the mandatory code in the beginning, it automatically goes for First Content Paint (FCP).
Whereas placing your scripts on the above fold will make the scripts to execute first and then only the contents will get displayed in your webpage. If you are running a wordpress website, there are plugins available like "Scripts to Footer" that automatically moves your scripts to the bottom.
5. Plugins
According to a recent survey, wordpress powers more than 30-25% of the total websites on the internet. If you are running a wordpress website, then one of the main reasons that impacts your webpage speed is the use of plugins.
While plugins can make your life a lot easier, especially if you are not technology savvy, it can also slow your website down, if you use too many plugins. Using plugins that are not optimized can also play a major role in website slowness. Every plugin comes with its own set of features.
While some control your UI/UX, some plugins assist in database calls. It is the plugins that interact with DB can cause website slowdown to a great extent. To assess you plugin performance, you can make use of Plugin Performance Profiler (P3) by GoDaddy.
Conclusion
With the advent of high-speed internet availability, everyone will expect websites to load quickly. Even Google has changed it algorithm to rank websites based on webpage speed and performance. Even though it is not entirely about your site rankings, slowness can lead to lower conversion rates as well. You can also make use of several website performance testing tools available online.
Hence, it is extremely important to test your website speed and performance and fix any issues that affect page slowness.
