Websites are businesses in the virtual world. The importance of having websites for businesses is becoming more important as more and more handheld devices are being introduced in the world compelling people to visit websites from them. The launch of many devices all at once has resulted in their reduced prices as well so almost everyone is now in the position to buy them. However, the increasing number of visitors on the websites has made the competition tougher and you can’t afford to not have the newest web designing techniques and strategies implemented on your websites today.
While businesses are spending time in making their websites beautiful and all attractive, they forget that stuffing websites unnecessarily with things that are not needed can actually go against them. Whatever modifications you make on your existing website or introduce on your upcoming one, make sure that they optimize the performance of your website and make it more effective. Some of the biggest businesses in the world lose their visitors only because their websites take ages to load. Some technical issues make these websites heavy and even the people with good internet connections aren’t able to view the websites within 5 seconds, let alone the people who have slow internet connections.
The mistakes that slow down the websites are pretty common on most of the websites. By taking care of these little things website owners can see their websites performing at their maximum. Here are the 7 mistakes that slow down even the best looking websites.
JavaScript Issues
This one is more relevant to the bloggers who have to deal with JavaScript a lot because they love to decorate their blogs with widgets. Bloggers are mostly people who don’t have much technical knowledge of how websites work and what widgets, add-ons and plugins actually do to a web page. JavaScript is infamous among technical experts for being a language that works on single-thread basis. If you have added something on your website that uses JavaScript, you must know that everything on your website will have to stay in a queue unless the JavaScript section of the website loads. Why? Because it is a single threaded language and this is the problem with it.
Most experts advise that the JavaScript components of the website are deferred when the website is loading. Let all other components of the website load and allow JavaScript components to load at the end. If you don’t do that, your visitors will be waiting for ages before they can interact with your website. This will push them away from your website.
Big Images With Inappropriate Formats
If you have large images on your websites you must know that they are going to occupy a lot of space. Furthermore, they will take quite some time in loading when a user opens your website. The heavy images can kill your website’s performance when they are being viewed on a mobile device such as a tablet or smartphone. These devices don’t have the best internet connections and the processors and memories to deal with these large files. Make sure the format of your images is JPEG. Using PNG could be your worst mistake because it has a huge size as compared to JPEG images.
Excessive HTTP Requests
This is considered one of the most common problems for all the websites that are slow. This particular problem has many branches but all of them can be taken care of with an intelligent approach. Too many script files can lead to too many HTTP requests and the best way to tackle that is to combine them in one place. Instead of having so many script files you can just have one and combine all scripts there. Furthermore, if there are many images on your website then it will send many requests to the server to load them. The best is to combine these images as one. The best solution is not to have too many images on a page at all.
Too Much Java Animations And Images
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that some businesses must have fancy looking websites in order to reflect their industry and how they work. Having too many Java animations and images on these websites can slow them down easily. The best solution is already out and all you need to do to get rid of the problem is use CSS3. CSS3 now allows you to introduce animations on your website without requiring too many files. These CSS3 animations are lightweight and don’t stop other things on the page from loading like the JavaScript animations do.
Using Old Web Standards
Using old methods of creating the websites from the scratch can also make your websites slower. There are new and improved methods to create websites so they are faster when created. For example, new platforms like Joomla allow you to create websites with a new pattern called the MVC pattern. You can separate the content on your website as model-view-controller. The CSS in this particular scenario is the view, HTML is the model whereas the JavaScript can serve as the controller. This is a much more efficient way of coding a website and results in a website that’s faster in its performance.
Not Using Browser Cache
Websites slow down when they don’t make use of local storage and browser cache. Using caching techniques could be a problem when dealing with mobile browsers since they don’t have big caches. However, the solution to this problem is also out. HTML5 Web Storage specification is something you can rely on when you want to improve the speed of your website by taking advantage of the cache. Furthermore, there are server caches too. Server caches store the pages that have been downloaded once by the internet users. Whenever the user needs to view that page again it is retrieved from the cache server rather than downloading the entire page again. This not only reduced the loading time of the web page but also saves bandwidth for the website owners.
Using Shared Hosting
If your website is on a shared server i.e. you are using shared hosting to host your website, you must know that the resources on one server are being used by many other websites. The other websites could be heavier or lighter in weight than your website. As more and more visitors visit a particular website it uses more resources. The use of more resources by this website results in slowing down your website. Furthermore, too much load on the server causes all the websites to be slowed down.
The best solution to this problem is virtual private server, also called the VPS. This is a huge server with many virtual servers acting as individual servers. It is quite like shared hosting but your resources are yours and allocated to you only. You could use those resources as you like and even switch your virtual server on and off without causing any troubles to other websites on the same server. You could go for dedicated hosting as well but that’s immensely costly and is not the fittest solution for small businesses. If you make up your mind to go for VPS, make sure that you will be charged if you want your server to be managed by your host too.
There are many other things that can slow down your website but these are the most common reasons that are slowing down the websites all over the internet. The good thing is that there are solutions available for these problems. It’s best that you use the services of only the professional website designers and developers so they can work on all of these problems to give you a website that loads faster. The faster your website loads the more visitors are likely to stay on it.
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