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 slowly:
- The amount and size of resources on the web page like widgets, link lists, images, and videos. The browser has to rethink 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 are a very close second. There are free tools online if you do not have a program to compress your videos and images.
- The database search is executed while the site loads. Static pages always load faster than database-driven web pages so try to use as many static web pages as possible. Most blogs have plugins to make their pages static just for this reason and because static websites are more reliable than database-driven sites.
- 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 slowdowns. If you have a dedicated server you might want to keep your high-resource sites to about 5 servers around there the speed of the server can be affected. 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.
Read more here at Web Host Pro’s FAQ Section