Why Is Your Website Loading Slowly?
Most internet users are not thrilled when they have to wait a long time for a website to load. Of course, if your website loads slowly, it will inevitably lose some of its audience.
No matter how interesting and useful a website is, it must load quickly enough. If you don't take steps to speed up a slow site, you can be sure that the audience will find a similar project that works much faster.
Users may even choose a slightly lower-quality website that works faster over a higher-quality one that requires a lot of time and hassle to use. Of course, in today's world, speed is more than important—every one of your competitors is just a click away!
Why is your website loading slowly? What causes slow page loads and freezes?
Often, loading issues occur with larger internet resources. At the same time, there are simple business card websites whose pages can take several minutes to load. In the latter case, the site's developers made mistakes in code optimization—this is especially important to note if the site was built on a powerful CMS that consumes a lot of server resources.
Anyone who wants to speed up their website should understand how the algorithms for fetching a page in the user's browser work.
For example, let's take a standard dynamic page that includes PHP code, a MySQL database, HTML, JavaScript scripts, and a stylesheet. When you enter the page address of such a site in your browser, after a few seconds you see the visual interpretation of the page. During this time, many processes occur:
- the browser sends a request to the server for the corresponding page;
- then the server processes the request, retrieves data from the database while simultaneously executing the PHP code of the page;
- and then everything is generated into HTML+CSS+JS to produce a nice-looking page in the browser;
- since JavaScript itself usually doesn't have a server side (excluding frameworks like Node.JS from this overview), it is processed on the browser side, meaning that only the size of the JS scripts loaded by the browser when displaying the page can affect loading speed.
In addition to data from your server, images, counter scripts, online chat scripts, external styles and fonts from other sources may be transferred. Sometimes, a page is slowed down by loading a script from an external source, or a font file with images, causing the site to appear as if it has loaded but looks messy and broken.
Another common cause of slow loading is database lag due to a large amount of data and poor database architecture.
If your website loads slowly, you need to:
- Check all delivered pages for unoptimized graphics or large scripts.
- Monitor the loading sequence of scripts and files from external sources to see if any of them is slowing down the display.
- Check if any script on the site that performs calculations or similar tasks is slowing down data retrieval.
- Check the database load.
- Check the availability of the server and hosting.
Good luck with improving your web resource!