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It’s not uncommon to hear people complain about slow load times on websites or even praise websites for being so fast and smooth. Even the non-tech savvy appreciate a fast loading website.

While many business owners don’t pay attention to the complaints of customers of how long their website takes to load and operate, just as many hear those complaints and fail to act on it. As anything in business, when a customer speaks, you should listen.

I believe, the reason business owners don’t take action many times is because of a lack of knowledge of what to do. Well, here are a number of reasons a website can load slow.

Hosting Environment

The most common problem with load times lies with the hosting environment. Many business owners look for the cheapest hosting option available. What they don’t realize is they are actually searching for the slowest hosting option available. The reasons companies like GoDaddy offer hosting so cheap is because they are putting you on another server with 500 other websites.

It’s not uncommon for “website hosting companies” to offer cheap/low-budget packages to accommodate the needs of those who aren’t looking to spend money. The problem is all that company is doing is providing access to a server with poor performance, and opening it up to site after site after site – meaning each site is sharing those low resources with everyone else. (Think of trying to open 400 internet sites on your computers – what will happen)

Many website owners simply don’t care, but the ones that do often end up on a high-performance/semi-dedicated server, or even a dedicated server. A dedicated server means that you sharing that entire server with JUST your website (Think running your computer with ONE website on it). Semi-dedicated/high-performance hosting environments generally offer a beefed up server from the get-go and only allow 4-6 websites to share the resources.

I don’t think I have to spell it out that the more performance a server offers, the more you’re going to pay. The more you’re going to pay, the faster your website is going to be.

Code/Issues On Site

The hosting environment isn’t EVERYTHING. There are many people who can get away with shared hosting – maybe not GoDaddy hosting, but shared hosting none the less. Another element that can cause slow load times is the code of your website. Many techniques have been developed to allow code to be processed quicker with actions taken faster.

Having the code on your website optimized can lead to your website loading much faster. Websites such as GT Metrx (www.GTmetrix.com)  will give you a grade for your page speed and for your load time. The website will also make recommendations on how to improve your sites performance.

Another website that can help you diagnose site performance issues is W3C. W3C offers markup validation services that will show you if your website consists of clean code. Many websites fail to have optimized code with no errors, simply because it’s doing it the right way. Many companies cheat in the code, knowing that you’ll never see it, but then you unknowingly feel the effects on the front-end via the load time. Check out W3C Validation (http://validator.w3.org).

Having out-dated code on your website can result in a slow load time as well. If you have outdated coding, or codes from broken websites or websites that no longer exist, your website can take a much longer time to load. In some cases, when trying to load code that it shouldn’t, your website can fail to load all together.

Traffic

A not so bad problem to have is too much traffic. Too much traffic only means too much if your server can’t handle it. You should never want reduced traffic. The more traffic you have, the more visitors you have, and the more visitors you have, the more money you can make.

If you are experiencing slow load times due to high volumes of traffic, you’re going to want to consult with a company, such as endLayer, that can provide you with methods of upgrading your server to better accommodate larger amounts of traffic. If you are unaware of the traffic on your website, you should install Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics) and monitor your traffic.

Even with third-party services such Google Analytics, GT Metrix, and W3C Validator, it can be very hard to self-diagnose website performance problems. The best way to go about fixing slow load times would be to call a company like Basch Solutions, LLC. who can help you by giving you a website performance break-down and suggest different areas of improvement.

Basch Solutions, LLC is a Rochester ny website design, Rochester ny website development company that also specializes in social media strategy, search engine optimization, and other web-based technologies and services. Read more about what we do or give us a call today to discuss how we can help you!