In the world of websites they say that if a page doesn’t load within four seconds that most visitors are likely to leave, so if your website is slowing, what are the top factors making it do so? Figuring out what it is exactly that is slowing down your website and how to remedy the situation can mean the difference in online life or death.
There are many things that can slow down your website but there are several factors that seem to crop up each and every time a website is slowing which include:
•Too many HTTP requests: An HTTP request has to do with what is on the page that needs to be downloaded other than text. Images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, and other fancy components can all lead to a slower load time for your website’s pages. To correct this, try to limit the number of HTTP requests that you put on each page. Remember that a great looking page is only great looking if people actually get to see it.
•Scripts are not at the bottom of the website: When you do not have your scripts at the bottom of your web pages the problem is that they block parallel downloads. This results in your page loading extremely slow and that ever important four second rule gets violated. The solution is to move your scripts to the bottom of the page so that they are the last thing to load.
•Java Script and CSS are not made external: To get your pages to load faster you should be sure that all Java Script and CSS files are external. This makes the pages load faster because the Java Script and CSS files are cached by the browser instead of your site. This in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests and cuts down on a major factor that slows down your website.
•Duplicate scripts: If a script such as Java Script is included twice on the same page it will obviously hurt the page loading performance. Don’t laugh, this happens more often than you might think and recent review of the top ten U.S. websites showed that two of them contained a duplicate script. When this oversight happens it creates unnecessary HTTP requests and wastes Java Script execution, which ultimately leads to a slower page load time.
•Too many cookies: HTTP cookies can be used for a number of different reasons such as authentication and personalization. This information about the cookies is exchanged between the HTTP headers of web servers and browsers and for this reason it is important to keep the size of cookies as minimal as you can to lessen the impact of the user’s time and thus lessen the time it takes for your web page to load.
Again, there are many other factors that could be involved with slowing down your website, but these are almost always among the culprits. Doing some small tweaking here and there can greatly affect the speed of your website and always make sure that the golden rule of a four second page load is observed.
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