What Causes Websites To Load Slowly And Its Solutions By Semalt 

Speed speed speed is the one language the internet speaks. Speed has become a necessity for survival. This is why you now have mind-blowing fast cars, planes, boats, and news. Everyone wants to do things as quickly as possible because we do not have enough time.  

Websites aren't left out in this deal. To survive on the internet, you must have your website load in fractions of a second. This is because no one has enough time to wait, and you do not want to get unlucky, hoping that your visitor is patient enough to wait for a minute to allow your website load completely. 

Your website needs to be able to load as fast as possible to increase its traffic, not to talk about the effects that will have on your ranking. Ever since Google's Mobilegeddon, page speed has become a serious cause of concern for many website owners. This wasn't just because there was a rise in the demand for more mobile visitors but also because websites started realizing they were losing potential leads and visitors due to a slow website.

Websites also began to understand that fast websites improved Google ranking, and social media platforms like Facebook also pushed instant loading articles on its users. Sites then began to improve their pages' loading pace, allowing visitors to scroll through without any delay.

There is a problem of figuring out how fast is fast enough? Yes, your website loads fast, but isn't fast a relative term? Your judgment of how fast your website loads is determined by what you consider fast. However, Semalt can run a diagnosis on your website, figure out how fast each page loads, and compares the speed to the standard speed a fast website has. 

The standards used for measuring how fast a website loads come from a study conducted by Geoff Kenyon, where he compares the speed and provides a result that is used as a guide on how fast your website is.

Rather than concluding that a specific speed is the best, each speed is only showing the percentage of websites it's faster than. This way, sites can either aspire to beat their current pace or maintain their current speed by feeling confident in the number of websites they left in their wake.  

However, other studies have published that the average load speed for webpages was dependent on their purpose. In a Google webmaster video, they advised that 2 seconds was the average speed of a website if it was intended for eCommerce purposes. However, Google itself is aiming for 0.5 seconds. 

This shows that every second count and at Semalt, we design and develop your website at the top one percent. It wouldn't be a bad idea if we beat Google in getting your website to load in 0.5 seconds. 

However, some problems cause websites to take too long in loading and Semalt it more than happy to share these problems and their solutions.

When a visitor clicks on a website link on Google SERP, the browser pings the server and requests all the required information to load the website, this process typically takes seconds, but it can get delayed. If the server your website is hosted on, or your server plan is poor, the process of requesting and receiving this data is delayed. This problem usually ranks first because even with everything else configured appropriately, your server performance has the final say on how fast your website will load. Opting for cheaper hosting services means your website will run off a shared server. Although this option is cheaper, there is a queue of websites on each server, making your website load slowly. 

The solution to this problem is to get a better web host or get your server. Having a personal server makes your website incredibly fast, and it enables your website to maintain good speed with more traffic at any given time.  

Have you noticed that long-distance calls usually take longer to connect? This is because the information needed to connect both devices has to travel a great distance. This same idea applies to servers—the distance from the device trying to access the website and the server matters. A longer distance means more cables, and satellites will be needed. Having a US user trying to ping a server in Denmark means that information to load the website has to travel halfway across the world and travel back before the website loads completely. This will make the website load slower than when a user in the US pings a server in the US.

The solution is to have not just one but multiple servers hosting your website. This makes it easier for local users to access local servers rather than having their signals travel great distances. 

As a website, we understand that if possible, you'd want every click to lead to your website. The problem with this wish lies in how powerful is your server? At any given time, a website can carry only a certain amount of users if the number of users exceeds this limit, the website begins to load slower. That happens because the server is beginning to take on too much load. When this happens, the server manager needs to devote more resources to the website to keep viewers satisfied.  

The solution is to improve your server plan and capacity. By improving the number of users your website's host can carry, you give your website enough juice to handle the rising traffic your website gets.  

Flash contents are an exceptional tool in improving the interactivity of a website. However, this can slow down a website's load speed when there is an excess number of them. This happens because flash contents are generally heavier, and having too many puts pressure on the website, causing it to more time loading.  

The solution is to reduce the sizes of flash messages if possible, or reduce the number of flash messages. HTML5 alternatives can also be used to replace existing flash content with more manageable file size. 

Having too much JavaScript, CSS, and too many image files will increase the number of HTTP requests on your website. What happens is that whenever someone visits your website, the browser will have to request information for every HTTP request, and if they are too many, the website spends more time loading.

The solution to this problem will be to give your website the optimum amount of HTTP requests using CSS Sprites. You can also reduce the number of files that will need to be loaded on the website. The benefit of doing this is that it significantly reduces the amount of data that a user would need to download when opening a web page.  

Chocking your website will inevitably cause your website to spend more time loading. Few things exert more load on your website asides the code you use in its design. Unless you have the resources to manage dense codes, it's best you keep it simple. Face book, for example, has around 62 million lines of code, Google has about 2 billion, but both of these companies have the resources to keep them running smoothly. Without a server that's powerful enough to carry these dense codes, loading a website will slow down. 

The solution will be to clean up your code and get rid of unnecessary lines. This can be done by removing excess white spaces, inline styling, empty news lines, and comments, which aren't important. Another solution is to improve the capacity of the server on which your website is hosted.

Caching is a technique browsers use to store frequently accessed data. This makes loading a website quicker because the browser has stored some information about that website, and when visited, it wouldn't have to load all the data again. With faster data retrieval, the website spends less time loading. Having a poor cache technique means the website will have to load all the data every time the user visits a particular site. Repeating this process can slow down the load speed and negatively influence the user's experience.  

The solution will be to implement browser / HTTP caching and server-side caching. Although you're not responsible for the website, these features help you encourage browsers to save Cache data.

Please pay a visit to Semalt today, and see us significantly improve your websites. Our services are extensive, and when we're done, your website would be on a rocket to Google's first SERP. A tour around our site will answer all the questions you may have about your website, SERP, and SEO. Our customer care team is also willing to answer any questions you may have.