Website slowness is a common complaint among many people. In this blog post, we are going to talk about some of the reasons why websites might be slower than they should be and what you can do to fix it. How much time have you wasted sitting there waiting for your website to load? Is your internet connection slow or does your web browser just take too long to open up certain pages? Well, if any of these sound familiar then you’re in luck because that’s exactly what we’ll be talking about today!
Here are five of the top reasons your website may be slow and how to fix them.

Performance testing

Performance testing, also known as load testing, is essential to ensure that your website can handle an increased number of visitors. It is a key performance indicator, when performance is monitored and measured, it can be a valuable tool for monitoring performance against goals. With enough load testing, you can identify performance bottlenecks so you can optimize both hardware and software for better results. In addition to slower response times and an overloaded server, certain errors may be present with poor performance-related metrics. Identifying these problems before it’s too late will help avoid any negative effects to your conversion rates.

Loading Time: Page loading time is something every visitor notices quickly – if it takes more than 10 seconds just to fully load content, visitors won’t wait around much longer before they navigate away from your site. Utilize tools like Google Analytics to see how long your pages take to load, which browser types need fewer redirects and which parts of your site could benefit from caching. Removing unnecessary scripts and increasing compression settings are only two ways to make pages load faster. A third way is to use new web technology called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). Performance testing is important because it helps pinpoint performance issues on your site – and fixes usually come at a minimal cost.  Contact Perma Technologies to identify what is blocking your website from running faster and fixing them.

Image optimization

I’m sure you’ve noticed that your site seems slow on different devices. This can be due to multiple reasons, but one of them might be loading time on mobile devices. Mobile connection speeds can vary significantly from one device to another and if your website does not load fast enough, users will abandon it for other sites they know work well on their phones. One way to make sure that your site loads fast for all devices is through image optimization. Reducing images’ file size and removing unnecessary layers can have dramatic effects on loading times which can make your site pages load faster without changing anything else. Too many images- run an audit to find out what images are being used.
With today’s numerous page-viewing options available, it’s important that your images not only look great but are optimized for quick viewing. After all, what good is an infographic about how many bowls of cereal Americans eat per day if visitors leave because they’re waiting too long to see it? Contact Perma Technologies to learn more and see how we optimize and improve website speed and performance

Javascript issues

JavaScript performance is another important factor to consider. Check your JavaScript code for performance issues and optimize it where possible, such as by inlining heavy scripts or using a cache module (i.e., $.cache). A really common performance issue with web pages is that they have too many different plugins on them which are adding overhead without being used.

The other important thing to consider is that some scripts are blocking the javascript execution on your webpage (i.e., asynchronous javascript). If you find any of these, then it may be time for a rethink: do we really need this script on our website? Is there a way we can use an API instead? Or have another javascript (or javascript library) load this script instead?

Caching

Caching can be done with plugins on Apache servers, in web browsers, or through CDNs. On Apache servers caching is either done through proxy caches or at what we call layers 3 and 7. Layers 3 and 7 refer to software that sits on top of the OSI model. Layer 7 operates at an application level and includes various middleware like WAFs (web application firewalls), and cache headers. Layer 3 refers to cache management built into your operating system’s kernel such as disk caching or RAID systems. A browser cache can store objects retrieved from web pages and reuse them for subsequent requests in order to save time retrieving data from external sources.
CDN gives you access to cached content stored in many different geographic locations around the world in order to provide faster delivery of your content while reducing load times on your own site because it offloads traffic from its origin server, instead of sending it directly to end-users who are geographically closer than you are. Inefficient code- use best practices such as caching, minification, and running scripts asynchronously where possible to improve website speed.
Currently, some popular CDN providers include Amazon CloudFront, Google CDN, Akamai Technologies, and MaxCDN which has the cheapest pricing plans

The number of requests on a page:

The more the number of requests on a page you have, the slower it takes to load the content and show them in the browser. A lot of websites are using too many plugins which they don’t need because some scripts or modules (e.g., social media share buttons) slow down the loading time of a webpage.

If you want to reduce cache memory consumption, use scripts that are loaded asynchronously so they don’t block parsing and rendering. And make sure your plugins load only once on a page from either external CDN or local server (i.e., no inline script).

Having a website that is slow can be the worst. That’s why performance testing is important for any website. Contact Perma Technologies to increase your website speed and improve your performance.