Speed is so important for your website. More and more search engines are seeing how important it is for a fast reliable web page. Google was the first to give you a higher ranking just for loading your website fast!
Here are some of the tops reasons you might have a slow site and get penalized or lose business from your sluggish site.
Over sold web hosting
There is no doubt this is the most ovious way your site can be slow. No matter what you do, if your web host has thousands of accounts on one server it will slow down time to time. Don’t risk this! Find a host that has about a 3-500 account limit no matter what server they use. Ask them, they should tell you the truth.
Big images!
Granted with the faster Broadband speeds, images are not as bad of an issue as they where say in 2005. For example our front page here at WebHost.pro used to be under 100k now we are comfortable around 500k but stay around 350k just to be safe. Images are by far the biggest part of our front web page. Photoshop is the top program for compressing and editing pictures but if you can’t get a copy then try Photoshop Elements, or Light Room is another one, but we have not tried Light Room. We have free ones available at Download Spot for Windows and Mac as well.
Messy code
Clean your site up! Over stacked tables and css on the page rather then a shared css file can slow down your page as much as 15%
Loops, redirects, and cron jobs.
Be really careful with anything in your htaccess or refresh tags. Double check everything before adding it to your htaccess or header tags. Cron jobs are a huge risk and the main reason sites overload and have issues. There is almost no reason to run them more than once a day. Like the htaccess and redirect tags, make sure you are double or triple sure of the code and time added before making them live!
All in one pages
Be careful having the whole page load in one table, it’s better to have at least three so your visitor will have something to read while they wait for the rest of the information to load in case they have a slow ISP.
Redundant high end hosting networks
Some hosts use really cheap networks, find out which networks have a bad rep and stay away. In our experience Cogent, Verio, ATT, and Sprint have had issues. We have removed them from our blend to only use the best possible connections available. This was years ago and they could be much better now.
Stray from from heavy templates and plugins
WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Ecommerce Carts, these are all very convenient ways to manage a website. You need to keep in mind just using these will slow down your site compared to a static website. If you do use CMS (content management system), be very careful with your plug ins and even more careful with your image sizes. The best speed improvement possible for a CMS is to add a “cache plug in” to make your site static!
Did we miss anything or have advice? Please share we want you to have the best site possible and sharing our thoughts will help everyone!