We wrote an article showing some reasons why you should have a fast website. Now we realize the importance of our audience to know some reasons for your site to be slow.
One thing is for sure: nobody deserves to wait for a website to load. Today we are talking about 5G and so many other technologies and having a slow website in this time is a sign of a bad business. But after all: what causes a site to load so slowly? This is what we will see throughout this article.
1. HOSTING
I do not want with this order to list the priorities, ok. The list of reasons that we will present are important to be analyzed to make your site load faster. And why did I start with the hosting service? Simple! This is where your site will be available 24h a day? With resources that guarantee maximum efficiency in delivering the site to your client’s browser? It all depends on what is being hired.
Nowadays we find Hosts, hosting services, which, in order to have a more attractive price range, customize the space available and the server resources such as processing cores, memory, I/O, among other resources, such as the datacenter location. In this case, what is the sense of hiring a hosting service whose datacenter is in America and that my potential customers are in Europe. Before even hiring a hosting service it is necessary to recognize the resources that are offered in the plans and identify what best fits the needs and not just choose for the best price.
2. CORE
Following the same reasoning of the item above, it makes no sense for me to have a super hosting service, with 16 processor cores, 64gb of memory, 8mb/s I/O if my site’s code is full of bugs. I understand some customers are worried about the language, because someone said they read in an article that language A is better than language B because memory resources are stored and … No way! The language used in the development of a website or web system does not have much relevance of its performance. What really should be considered is the way the codes are written. A clean, objective code, with good written queries and with a good assembled database guarantees that the site will work very well. But how to evaluate this? I don’t know anything about programming? Nowadays everything is “click and drag”! Yes, it is! But a good programmer knows how to differentiate a clean code and knows how to consider which of these “click and drag” tools can harm the performance of your site and, for sure, will use in your project what is more efficient.
Another point about the codes of your site that should be taken into consideration are the CSS and Javascript. If your site is built the right way you will not have problems with number of requests made to external files such as jQuery, Javascript and CSS libraries. Now, if you use a CMS like Joomla or WordPress you need to be very careful when choosing plugins in general. Each one of these plugins aggregate their respective codes and libraries for it to work properly. These should be handpicked so that your site has maximum efficiency. A good programmer knows how to analyze and recognize a good plugin, and can even optimize it to make it more performant.
3. UPDATES
One point that many people do not worry about when they are going to hire a hosting service is the software that they provide, mainly the OS version, webserver and database. Like any software, these also need updates, either for improvements or for fault fixing.
These updates are no different for the plugins we use on your site, as well as third-party libraries. Besides optimizing the performance of your site by keeping it always up to date, you drastically reduce the risks of having some kind of vulnerability in your site. A good programmer knows how to analyze each one of these updates, besides recommending the realization of a backup always before any update of software, plugins, colours or third-party libraries.
4. IMAGES
Many people think that the quality of the images that become available on the website must have an excellent resolution. And these people are not wrong! The quality of the images brings to the site a charming beauty and the client’s perception is related to what he sees and then to what he reads. Imagine a physical shop of any segment preparing the window display in any way. You can’t imagine, can you! Everything is very well thought out, organised and set up just to delight the client. Only afterward will he want to know the price and other details. On the website it’s the same thing. Well put together images, with well organized spacing between text and a good alignment between the other elements makes all the difference. But one thing leaves a lot of web designers and programmers wanting: the weight of the images. Images for the web don’t need the same quality as an image that will be printed. I’ve seen sites with images with an incredible 28mb (not total images, but just a single image). Whoever manages the content of a site needs to pay attention to this. And the programmer can guide and explain these differences so that your project is successful and relevant not only in relation to the website, but also for the maintenance of performance indicators.
As much as there are software and scripts for the compression of images for the web, there is nothing better than human perception to determine the quality of an image for the web. Software like GIMP and PhotoShop are excellent for these compressions. A good programmer and a good designer know well how to use them effectively to make your images more dynamic for your site.
5. THIRD-PARTY CODE
Managing a website is not an easy task. Developing it in an effective way much less. The time it takes to write good code can become a big problem when measuring the hours needed for the development of a web project. Imagine creating a custom library for your CSS and Javascript to make your site responsive, lazy loader of images, rotating banners, a slideshow of testimonials and images of your clients’ logos. There are pre-formatted codes for some features that have already become part of the programmer’s day-to-day and are already considered in the development of projects. In addition to these there are other types of third-party codes that are
Bringing in these third-party codes can be an exciting step for your workload and projects, allowing you to add new features and in many situations even feed into open source community initiatives and leverage some of the best code out there. However, this can be an opportunity for hackers to access your systems and data. Even if your vendors claim to be secure, their code may not necessarily conform to your company’s security standards and compliance requirements. Developers can’t leave all risk management to their security counterparts; developers need to share that responsibility in the same way they share the responsibility for writing their own secure code.
Third-party codes are not only these to optimize the time of a project’s development, but also those that will enable analysis of customer behaviour while they are on your site. Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel, ReCaptcha are some examples of third-party codes that in almost all existing sites are implemented and that in some situations cause some slowness in the loading site.
There are some ways for you to optimize these loads to the point of not harming its real objective as well as the performance of your site. A good programmer knows how to perform this implementation.
6. BONUS
Some tools that will help you check if your site has some opportunities for improvement.
- Pingdow Tools – Gives you some statistics like load time and site weight;
- WPSec – Tells you if your WordPress site has any known vulnerabilities;
- PageSpeed – Insights – Google has revamped PageSpeed – Insights, which is the main tool you should use to pass the essential web vitals. Some things are still tested on a 3G network, otherwise the results are similar to Lighthouse and the main web vitals report in Google Search Console. Thanks Google for finally updating this;
- Chrome Dev Tools – find your largest CSS / JS files in Fonts → Coverage, third-party domains (Fonts → Page) and other performance issues, such as when fonts are preloaded but not being used (learn how to open Chrome’s dev tools);
- CLS Debugger – view a GIF of your website layout changes (CLS) on mobile/desktop;
- KeyCDN Performance – test TTFB / DNS lookup times in 10 global locations.
- Wordfence live traffic report – see what bots are accessing your site in real-time (great for checking if bad bots are accessing your site and consuming CPU). Uninstall Wordfence when you’re done as the plugin increases CPU;
- WP Hive – Chrome extension that lets you search the WordPress plug-in repository and see if a plug-in affects memory usage and PageSpeed scores;
- WP Query Monitor – find your slowest plugins. Install it, view any page on your site and go to Queries (shown in the admin bar) → Queries by component;
- WP Optimize – clean up your database of unused tables left by old plug-ins you have uninstalled. Some plug-ins/modules increase especially when they need to process data (Rank Math analysis module), which you will see in WP-Optimize.
