4 Things That Will Increase The Load Times of Your Website

Everyone loves a fast internet connection. How many times do you back off a site that takes more than a few seconds to load? However, despite the efforts that you make towards having that desirably-fast connectivity, your internet connection could still have snail-slow load times. Even if you have the highest speeds of internet connection, your load times can still be high due to these four main causes.

Streaming video is one of the most taxing activities, in terms of bandwidth. Live-streaming a video from the internet consumes even higher bandwidths. When the dedicated bandwidth for your internet connection becomes dedicated to streaming a video, it slows down other web pages that use the same bandwidth. Activities such as uploading and downloading large material from the internet generally tend to clog up the bandwidth as well.

Plug-ins are micro-software and applications that are normally added to websites to boost their functionality. Like any other web applications, plug-ins normally require web resources including the internet to keep them running. Most plug-ins that affect a website’s internet connectivity and loading speeds function by performing database queries. For instance, plug-ins that track web page users or relay live feeds from comments generally tend to have a high number of database requests which can slow the loading speeds.

The host that you choose for your website can have a big impact on how fast visitors will be able to navigate it. For example, if you have a relatively small site with a small traffic flow, then most cheap hosting packages can handle that at a reasonable speed. But if you have a larger site with lots of traffic, you'll need a more expensive (and specialized) hosting package to prevent things from slowing down to a crawl. Shared servers are generally the slowest, while cloud hosting and dedicated servers are faster.

Web browsers act as intermediaries between web content and the user. They decode the website’s coding language and present the data accurately. All browsers are typically updated to ensure compatibility with new web coding techniques rolled out in the market. Failure to update your web browser will slow down the loading speeds of the website since the browser could have incompatibility issues with website codes and it won’t be running as efficiently.

With all other factors held constant, a webpage can still load slower due to technical issues as pointed out above. To appropriately diagnose the cause of high loading times for a web page, you can test and compare the loading speeds of a given website with another. When experiencing such a problem, it is good to check your website for effects of any of the above outlined common causes of high load times.

• Bitcatcha | 10 Frustrating Reasons Why Your Website Speed Is Slow
  
• 4 Good Hosting | Testing – And Improving – Page Speed for More Responsive Sites
  
• AT&T Experience | What is a Good Internet Speed for Your Household
  
• WP Engine | It’s Not the Number of Plugins, It’s the Quality