When you are in the fast lane, enjoying the unbridled zooming and speed, there is only one thing that can throw a wrench in your enjoyment: slow or obstructing drivers. The same principle applies to online surfing. As you are riding the net waves, having to wait for an excessive amount of time on a slow website can be nerve-wracking.
While some of us have experienced the era of dial-up internet, there is no excuse or reason to go back to that. Failing in optimizing your site only results in your users not getting the info they want and tarnishes the overall user experience. To best get a feel for these situations, always start with yourself as an example. Would you wait for over a minute or so for any website to load its content? Of course not, which is why you must identify the causes of your slow website and understand how to fix them.
1. The basics
It always pays off to learn and maximize the essential items when you are starting. Since they are considered basic, it is easy to overlook them. CSS, JavaScript, your code and the files on your site all play key roles in its overall speed. The bulkier the code, the more it takes for the site to load and display all the info. For example, your code may contain unnecessary characters and line breaks, which are all contributing to its failing loading speed.
Luckily there are tools to help you out, like Autoptimize, that can show and pinpoint these speed bumps and smooth the way. Digital Marketing means that there are multimedia files present on your site. If you don’t want your site looking like it is from the stone age, there are certainly some images, files and videos present. These can be bulky and, if left unoptimized, can cause a slowdown. Change your images to .jpeg files as these are much smaller in size and are thus loaded faster.
This simple site Tiny PNG can help you in resizing and changing their type and, we advise doing so for all of your images present on the site. Your CSS and JavaScript need to be loaded first. After that, they get applied or executed. If they are bloated and unoptimized, that’s another speedbump along the road. Having asynchronous loading implemented is a must-do for modern sites. Also, consider using Google Tag Manager. If you chose an optimizing tool, stick to that as having multiple of them and various API strings running are also a factor
2. High traffic
Having high traffic may sound like an awesome thing to have, if not handled correctly, it only becomes a nuisance and a liability. Information travels faster than we can comprehend, but jams and slowdowns can happen when your site experiences an extreme amount of traffic on it. Your hosting service can be the cause here as it may not provide adequate bandwidth or technical background. You can always reach out to them for more info and maybe change plans accordingly.
While having proper SEO in Sydney can drive your traffic up, with that increase you have to do a follow up with the hosting service as well. Look at SEO and Hosting Services as two parts of a while. SEO drives traffic to you and, Hosting Services accommodate them once they arrive. Waiting in line for a prolonged period can drive anyone crazy but, there are simple solutions that can help you capitalize on your sudden increase in customers. After this, you can sit back and enjoy the fruits of your investments as these numbers keep going up!
3. Bad Advertisement
We understand that having ads and banners on your site are a source of income. More does not equal better here. Plenty of users have various add blockers installed, so all you are doing with excessive and violent advertising is hampering your site. Monetizing on your global expansion with a few harmless and discreet ads that are well placed in one thing. But, bombarding your visitors with an overwhelming amount of pop-up and flashing tabs is a sure way to get blocked.
Every ad sends an HTTP request, so imagine having an X number of ads that are all sending requests individually. Now, multiply that per user for each visit and, you can see how this can clog up the logs and slow the overall performance as servers struggle to keep up. Only use and apply them when and where they are needed. A minor loss in advertising fees is negligible when compared to the loss in customers from said excessive ads.
4. More compression equals more optimization
Is it easier to carry one box or thousands? In the same way, it’s easier for your site and code to load a single object or a file than a billion little ones. With gZIP compression, you are instructing your server to wrap up all of the objects in a single file. Then they are sent over to the requesting browser. Kinda like zipping up multiple files on your PC into a single .zip or .rar file.
This compression method lowers the server response time as it reduces the overall data transfer size. Since the bandwidth between your server and your customer’s browser, is not being overloaded with multiple files that all add up to much more than a single file, the overall request is much faster. To reference one more analogy, you are handing someone a completed picture of a puzzle and not the individual pieces in this manner.
5. Minimalistic approach with Plugins and addons
“There is an app for that” used to be the saying when mobile phones were taking off. Soon after, the same applied to plugins and addons. While these can be incremental to your user interface and preference, the same logic does not transfer well. Yes, there are surely some plugins and add-ons necessary for your site to function.
What’s needed here is a thorough and realistic revision and approach. This can help you identify those that you can continue without. Monitor their resource consumption so that you can get a better understanding of those that are resource hogs and those that are light on consumption. Then wage their cost versus the benefit that they offer. Now, you have a list of those that are a priority and, you can start singling out the dead weight that’s dragging your site performance down. We can suggest getting a fundamental test of your loading speed via a tool like Google Pagespeed Insights.
6. Get rid of Flash
It’s hard to move on from any relationship that we had previously invested ourselves in. Flash addon was amazing in its time. That is all done and changed in recent times and Flash has become a liability. A glorious asset back in the day is now heavy, bloated and unnecessary. It’s dragging your performance down with every piece of content presented. With a simple switch to any HTML 5 alternative on the market, you are already making a difference and doing wonders for optimizing your site.
7. CDN
CDN stands for the content distribution network, which is a distributed network of independent servers located in several geographic locations. Now, what does this mean for your site and its optimization? Since you are probably getting visitors from all around the world, there is a lot of traffic and communication that is going on in between servers. A person from the other side of the world can have a hard time interacting with your content if you don’t have CDN placed in between.
These serve web content to website visitors with increased availability, visibility, and performance regardless of their location. It goes something like this. It gives the website in Australia a server for its Australian visitors. In return, the round-trip-time (RTT) is minimized of the web content and loads web pages much faster.
We hope that any or all suggestions from above will help you out in your quest for optimization and a better overall user experience. We wish you all the best in your future endeavors.
