Help! My Web Page Loads too Slowly!

what-determines-my-website-speedThe loading time of your company’s web page can substantially affect its overall success. In the age of high-speed Internet, people invariably prefer sites that load quickly, and the more quickly your website loads, the more likely a given browser is to stay for your site’s content. If your company’s web page loads too slowly regularly, examining these factors can help optimize its speed for all users, and you can read more about business web hosting at iiNet.

Determine Load Issues

Before addressing your page loading speed issues, you’ll need to establish their root causes and how severe they are. There are many online tools designed to analyze the loading speed of a web page for this purpose, with two of the most popular being Google’s Pagespeed Insights and YSlow by Yahoo. Utilities like these give you a better understanding of which elements are slowing down your page, allowing you to form a defined action plan.

Examine Images

One of the most common causes of slow page loading speeds is an excess of large pictures. Pictures that are larger than necessary create drastic drops in performance compared to pages with optimized images, so if your page loads too slowly because of large images, consider using an image compressor to downsize them into a more manageable form. Image compressors reduce the total size of ideas without affecting quality by removing unnecessary bytes from the file.

Optimize Scripts

Active scripts such as CSS and JavaScript tools can also sharply lower the performance of web pages. You can alter these scripts with tools like Minify and SquishIt or have your page scripts analyzed by a professional to remove unnecessary scripts and code from your page. You can also optimize this type of file by combining them to decrease the total processing time required to deliver your page data across the network.

Monitor Performance Regularly

To ensure your web page runs smoothly every time, it is best to constantly track its load speed performance with a network monitoring tool such as Collectd or Zenoss. Monitoring the performance of your web page regularly will help you identify any slowdown as soon as the issue occurs, and in an age when page loading speed represents a core facet of page ranking algorithms like Google, protecting the speed of your web page is more important than ever.

A recent study indicated that most users will abandon a site that takes 3 seconds or more to fully load, meaning that each delayed loading of your web page effectively amounts to money out of your pocket. Ensuring your website performs at a high level could be the key to ensuring your business does the same.