Slow loading websites are still the number one reason why people leave a website before buying, here are some flags for what might be slowing down your website.
The top 5 reasons a website loads slow:
- The amount and size of resources on the web page like widgets, link lists, images, videos. The browser has to rethink for each item so it is better to use a similar theme for each web page.
- Images and Videos that are not properly optimized and re-sized is a very close second. There is free tools online if you do not have a program to compress your videos and images.
- The database search executed while the site loads. Static pages always load faster then database driven web pages so try to use as many static web pages as possible. Most blogs have a plug-ins to make their pages static just for this reason and because static websites is more reliable then a database driven site.
- Flash driven sites are known for lagging and sometimes crashing browsers, try to only use flash for videos, tutorials, banners, headers, and examples. Full flash sites will put you in the lowest loading speed category quick.
- Overloaded servers can cause site slow downs. If you have a dedicated server you might want to keep your high resource sites to about 5 to server around there the speed of the server can be effected. Also contacting DWHS to have us look over the server for free is a good way to make sure the server is as fast as possible. Be careful with mass budget hosting, they tend to overload their servers to make up for their cheap costs.
Great post! I bet you put a lot of research into it.
Nice looking blog you have here. The theme is awesome, great color combination.