You want a fast website – you need a fast website if you want web traffic. Chances are if your website doesn’t load in the first second, you lose that web visitor. The AOL dial-up connection is no more, but perhaps it makes an interesting cell phone ringtone. So, how to make your website load fast? Or what is making your website load soo slow? Here are some good tips!
1) Website Coding. It is really important to have good website coding. That is the base that you need to consider. If you have bad website coding / bad website builder program as your website framework, no matter what you do your website will load slow. Check out websites using the program you plan on using – if they all load slow, there is an issue with the program. The best check is checking websites listed in their Showcase page – if those are all slow, beware and choose another program. Also check how fast the website builder website itself loads, if they are using their website builder program for their own website (we do!).
2) Content You Add. The content you add to your website matters, not just for SEO (search engine optimization), but also for how fast your website loads.
Things to consider here:
A) Images: How large are the images that you are using? Each image, customarily, should be under 1mb in size. If you do need to use image sizes larger than that for some reason, the number of images also will make a difference. Bigger size, more images to load = slower page load time.
Also, beware how you copy/paste images into your website builder editor – if you copy/paste from a bad program, you could be slowing down your website by A LOT just because of this. The best way to assure to avoid this is to embed/upload the images using the actual website builder program that you are using for your website.
B) Third Party Plugins: If you embed a slow loading third party plugin, this can also slow down your required page load times.
C) Amount Of Content On Each Page: Be mindful of how much content you have on each page. Check the page loading time if you are not sure if it’s too much or not.
3) Spam. If you are getting a lot of spam on your website, it can make a negative impact on your website – not just for the user experience, but also it can eat up your server resources and stall webpage loads for users and members who are actually interested in your website. The solution? Have your server tech check and review your server, and give them information of any times your website loading times are reduced/stalled. Server tech can identify the issue and problem ips, and verify if there is spammy user activity. If there is, the solution is to block those spammy user ips from accessing your website. An example of spammy activity is a user, or should we say robot, repeatedly loading a page, thousands of times in minutes.
4) Server (Web Hosting Account). Your server matters. Different servers provide different service and quality. Unlimited disk space is great, but not at the expense of server quality and bandwidth (data transfer). Server quality impacts your webpage loading speed.
5) Your Server, Content, & Traffic. You need a server with enough resources to handle your traffic and your content. You have content, you need enough disk space to host it. But more than that, if you have a lot of content and a lot of traffic you need a server that allows for enough bandwidth, i.e. data transfer – the amount of data that is sent from your website to a visitors’ computer, and vice versa. In summary, bandwidth is dependent on the number of visitors to your website and the size of your webpages/files (including photos, videos, etc.), and the size of files they upload to your website. You can estimate the amount of bandwidth you need per month using this formula: Visits/Day * Page Views/Visit * Average Page/File Size * 30 Days. You can also monitor your server stats from your web hosting control panel, cPanel, to check if you need to upgrade to a server with more resources. If you need to upgrade your server because your website is gaining in popularity and has lots of real user traffic, congratulations!
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