What are the Factors that Affect Website Speed

What do all successful businesses have in common? They all have awesome, well-functioning websites. Their websites hold all the information you’ll need about their branding, their products, and their services. They may even have a blog! Ideally, all websites should follow the same trend: they should look unique, be user-friendly and navigable, and hold relevant content. Unfortunately, pushing all of these things in web development might hurt website optimization. This may especially affect your website speed.

When you hire web design teams such as ours in Pnetform web development, we keep a lot of these factors in mind. However, if you’re concerned with website speed, here are the things you should watch out for:

• Are you with the right web host? You can avail the services of a lot of web hosts when it comes to bringing your site to life. However, not all web hosts can be compatible with what you need. If your website has a lot of resources, your web host may not be able to keep up with your needs. This makes it very likely for your website to have intermittent and slow loading speeds. You can add double the trouble if you’re using a shared server environment.
• Are you using an incompatible browser or application? If you’re pushing for mobile integration, make sure you approach your web development with care. In fact, 64-percent of consumers with smartphones actually expect pages to be loading under four (4) seconds. Not only that, you should be careful with the kind of browsers you’re using with your website’s apps. For instance, Flash might look good but mobile devices may not be able to view them properly. Chrome also gets to be a bummer when it comes to some website plugins.
• Are you lacking a Content Delivery Network? One of the major causes of slow website loading will be servers getting too much content to sift through. You might want to invest in a CDN to help ease the load off your servers. CDNs allow you to store various forms of relevant website data in data centers around the world. This makes retrieval of your content much faster, as users don’t need to access content from halfway across the globe.
• Are you careful with your coding? A lot of good web development has less to do with how pretty sites are, but more on how well they’re build. Proper coding can greatly enhance a website’s performance. This is especially the case if your programmer can actually find ways to do shortcuts with code, remove unnecessary scripts, or implement better coding techniques.
• Are you using too much of external embedded media? It helps to balance your approach with aesthetics to how it can affect website speed. Studies show that almost 50-percent of site visitors expect your website to load in just two seconds. Any longer than three seconds, and they may actually leave. Image slideshows, music, and videos can add appeal to your website. However, they can also add to your website’s script, which can potentially increase your loading time and loading speed.
• Are you neglecting compression and reducing image sizes? Images add a lot of appeal to your webpage. However, adding a lot of images also contribute to increasing file sizes. However, it’s not too late for your website. You can ease website page loading speeds if you use Gzip compression, as it can reduce HTML, JavaScript, and CSS sizes by as much as 50-percent. Not only that, but simply trimming a few pixels off large images can reduce image size as well.
• Are you using too many plugins and widgets? You need to be careful how you integrate features in your pages as well. If you have an online store, 79-percent of buyers who didn’t like your site’s performance may not buy from you again. Granted, a lot of widgets and plugins can help you do a lot of things with your website. However, they can also be the main reason why your site may not be loading properly. If you have a lot of widgets and plugins, you have to remember that your website will also take time loading each of them properly.
• Are you working your ads properly? It’s very likely your website has online advertisements. After all, they really tend to bring in a lot of income in terms of monetization. However, a lot of ad network codes come in the form of JavaScript. You need to be careful just how much JavaScript you have in your site’s code, as this can slow your website.

Approach Web Development With Website Speed

If you’re planning on building a website for your brand, always approach website optimization with website speed in mind. Remember, web development isn’t all about making your website pretty and loaded with content. A huge part of efficient web development has to do with ensuring your website content doesn’t compromise your speed.