Web Users Are Not Tolerating Slow Loading Sites

Website speed matters! There is no question about it. Internet connection speeds are increasing all around the world. This has made web users less tolerant of sites that load slowly. At the same time, search engines such as Google are saying that they will be rewarding faster sites by giving them higher rankings in their search results. All of us are well aware that users would rather click and move on to the next site rather than waiting for a site to load.

Site speed is a priority in case you wish to sustain and grow your business. Hence look at your site carefully and analyze its speed of loading. This has to be done on a continual basis. Even if the speed is alright, keep on making efforts to enhance it still further.

You need to size all images that you upload on your site. There are content management systems that allow you to upload images at their full size. Now their display size will get adjusted at the site’s backend. This also means that the web browser is executing multiple commands. It needs to pull up the original image and then re-size it. This can impact the loading speed of your site. Thus it is better to set the images to their correct size before you upload them to your site.

The speed of a site will always depend on its web hosting service. Hence you need to choose a reliable and reputed web hosting service provider.

There is no need of unnecessary plugins. Though these are freely available, they need resources in order to run. If resources are used up in running plugins, the site will get slower.

Add only those plugins which can provide some functionality to your site. Also, try to add the plugin’s content into the theme of your site instead. There may even be plugin conflicts in case of too many plugins being active at the same time.

Leveraging the Results

First of all, if your site passes the tests without problems and is given excellent grades by the performance measurement tools, then you have a site that is fast and efficient. In short, whatever the recommendations, it's up to you to see what you can do to take them into account. Note that you can automate these tests without too much difficulty and thus supervise your site. On the other hand, if the measurement tools reveal one or more points that are responsible for the poor performance of your website, you must try to correct them to improve the results of the next tests.

From then on, you can move on to the next part. In the results obtained, it is possible that it is recommended to you, for example, to condense your CSS files in a single file, or finally to optimize your PHP, HTML or other code. Measurement tools will be your allies to help your web project to have the shortest possible load time.

For sure if you are not a web developer, it will be complicated to improve that. Far from attempting to describe all the possibilities of results and suggestions, I shall rather give some examples of common problems. But, what is certain is that by utilizing performance enhancement tools as a way to improve your site, your site should gradually gain in performance and therefore in speed.

Whatever tool or tools you use, you need to understand the results of your site's tests and measurements. If you aren’t an IT guru, you can at least focus on other non-development issues such as: Choosing a better host or service that provides a more powerful shared server, dedicated to seeing a geolocation more favorable to your customers; optimizing images by resizing and / or compressing your images; making use of a CDN offer, there are free services on the web; or setting up a cache system.

Using Load Testing to Evaluate Website Performance

When developing any type of software such as business applications, games, or websites, a developer seeks to design software that achieves the goals and performance desired. After development of a website, software testing is the next step in the software lifecycle. There is intensive software testing that must be conducted to assess the actual functionality of the website.

Following this functionality testing, a thorough development process will include various types of testing conducted to assess the level of software performance under normal conditions and numbers of users all the way to peak conditions of “stress” where a simulation of a large number of users utilizing the website simultaneously. This one type of testing is known as “load testing”. Load testing is one of many metrics that can be measured to determine how efficiently a website behaves under normal functional conditions as well as testing the performance level under periods of stress, according to this website. If you're interested in learning more about load testing, you can check out LoadTesting, a comprehensive guide to stress and performance testing written by and for developers.

By utilizing load testing to study the performance of the website software, one can determine whether there are modules within the design that are functioning at a lower performance level than desired. While differing modules of software are designed to work together to form a fully functional website, any one of the specific modules can be identified as weak links in the software design. These weak links can contribute to overall problems of poor website performance. Identifying “bottle-necks” within website design can allow the developer to assess these issues and tweak the software design so as to enhance the overall design and the level of performance of the website.

While a solid development effort is the first step towards a superior website design, this must be followed up with various types of performance testing. Load testing is a significant part of the process with the ultimate goal being a website that functions at a superior performance level.