What Factors Affect The Loading Speed Of A Website?
Website performance is the speed by which your website loads on different web browsers. It is the process of using multiple methods for improving website loading speed and performing better for all visitors.
Having a good website loading speed is important for the success of any website. Poor website loading can lead to high bounce rates and poor user experience.
Multiple factors affect your website’s loading speed. We have identified 4 important factors that impact website performance.
Server/ Hosting
The server that you’re hosting your website on can drastically impact the speed of your website. Initially, your web host might have limited bandwidth and if your website is requesting increased bandwidth than what you have available, it may lead to slowing down the data transfer to align with the bandwidth your web host is providing. Your other issue is where your web host’s servers are based. In case you are targeting the UK, make sure your WebHost has servers in the UK. If your servers are far away, it will take a longer time to transfer data from your server to their system. However, it might be only a few hundred seconds delay; this is all it takes to put users off.
Traffic Volume
The damage caused by the amount of traffic you are receiving is dependent on the bandwidth of your website. As we’ve just mentioned, different host providers will have different bandwidth frequencies and generally have tiered payments for various bandwidths to match different requirements. For websites with an average page size of 50KB, 20,000 visitors per month and 5 pages per visitor, they would need 5 GB of bandwidth per month. No website achieves 20,000 monthly visitors so there is no need for high bandwidth. To work out your bandwidth needs, use this calculator. 1625 petabytes. The reason it’s important to know your bandwidth needs is to ensure all visitors have fast loading times and whilst it’s okay to overrate your requirements, you should never underestimate them. An example of what would happen if you underrate your site’s bandwidth can be set up by looking at YouTube. From some perspective, 1 petabyte is original to 1 million gigabytes. So if YouTube were to only have 5 GB of bandwidth nothing would be suitable to watch a video (even in 144p).
Plugins
Plugins are essential for any website. Plugins make things easier for most website owners, as pile on the plugins to automate a bunch of work and whilst this does minimise their website management, it will largely damage website speed. When a visitor comes onto your website, the front-end plugins you have on your website load. It means if you had 10 front-end plugins on your website, for every caller 10 plugins would have to load. Plugins can be either removed or replaced with an optimized version. If you have many plugins, then go through them and make a list of what’s demanded but slowing your website and what plugins aren’t required at all. For the ones that aren’t needed at all, remove them. For those required but slowing down your website speed, check for the alternatives with high reviews. If you using the free version, then check with the paid version to perform better.
Images & File Size
Lastly, the images and files you have on your website can affect the website’s speed. Large images slow down your website and it is something that Google is beginning to emphasize on their Core Web Vitals. The issue is further bandwidth is needed from your website to allow a visitor to download. It means if you place a file request taking up a large portion of your bandwidth your point will see a drop in speed. Now, you may not remove these images, but there are free tools available to reduce the file size reduction that can help combat this issue. It also goes for any form of large files that you are hosting on your website.