10 problems that can affect the speed of your website
It can be frustrating when a website takes too long to load and this has a negative effect on the positioning of a site in the search engines and therefore leads to a decrease in conversions.
Optimizing the speed of your website is decisive, especially if you want to take advantage of your competition. If you see that your pages take more than 3 seconds to load, it is time to identify what factors may be slowing them down.
I will show you what are the main causes of this decrease in performance and how to solve these problems.
- Caching issues
Browser caching is very important to regular visitors to your site. Every time a user enters your website for the first time, their search engine saves all the images, CSS and Java files, for a specified time. In this way, the caching of the browser allows these saved files to be quickly available on the next visit of the user.
Reducing the number of information submissions results in shorter page load times as well as a better user experience. However, misconfiguring your site's cache can affect the performance of your pages.
If you don't use WordPress, you can link Cache Control and Entity Tags (ETags) with your HTTP response headers. These tags are used to validate the client's most recent visit record, while Cache Control is used to define storage policies, both on the server and on the client.
If you use WordPress, you can use caching plugins to improve its performance. WP Rocket is a premium cache plugin that includes a database cleaner and CDN integrations, among other applications.
- Database overloaded
An overloaded database can be a silent problem when it comes to your website performance. Some difficulties of the pages that run in WordPress is that they have an excess of data stored in reviews of publications, deactivated plugins and drafts. In the same way, Trackbacks and Pingbacks have no practical use in WordPress, so I recommend that you disable them as they fill your database, thus increasing the number of requests for sending and loading information.
Make sure to delete spam folders, recycle bins, temporary files, and data tables that can slow down your site.
- Outdated Content Management System
Working with an outdated version of your Content Management System can slow down your site and cause some vulnerabilities. Some systems like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal notify you when an update is available. Having the latest version of plugins and software for the platform your site runs on will also allow you to protect it from malicious software, which is a great advantage when it comes to maintaining good performance on your pages.
In the event that you have not updated your Management System or have not received any notification to do so, I recommend that you find out if the host service of your site is compatible with the latest version of your system.
- Excessive use of social media scripts
Social networks have become an essential part of any site. No matter how big your website is, you need to connect your social networks so that your visitors can easily share your content. However, the excessive use of these scripts and plugins can damage the performance of your website.
I recommend that you limit the number of social media plugins and scripts that you don't use at all and look for alternative ways to schedule and automate your posts.
Placing the options to share a publication on social networks is an excellent way to generate traffic to your content. However, it can generate a lot of load for your site. I recommend that you determine if it is necessary to generate these links on each page, to use them only on the most important ones.
- Use of chatbots
This resource is very important to handle queries and interact quickly with your site visitors. However, chatbots can damage the speed of your pages, if the application script is not implemented properly.
I recommend that you check if your chatbot loads asynchronously. This means that when the tool performs an action on your website, such as starting a conversation with a customer, it should be done by external servers. To achieve this, use the correct code that allows you to perform this action and check if there are any anomalies with your chatbot script, using Google's speed measurement tool.
- Broken links
These links are not only annoying for users, but also represent a waste of bandwidth on your site. To solve this problem, I recommend doing an analysis of your links, to detect which of these present a 404 error, through the Google Webmaster Tool. Once you repair them, the average loading time per user may decrease depending on the number of broken links you have.
In this way, if you have many broken links, you will be reducing speed and positioning of your pages. Additionally, these links can harm your user behavior metrics.
- JavaScript processing blocking
Every time your website loads in the browser, it sends calls to every script that is in a row. This should be empty before the site appears in the browser. If this row is too long, it can slow down the loading of your page and not allow your visitors to fully see the site. These types of script rows are render blocking calls for JavaScripts and CSS files.
To make your pages load faster, Google recommends removing the script processing block. I recommend that before removing it, you identify which ones are causing problems, using Google's PageSpeed Insights.
- AMP- Accelerated Mobile Pages
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a Google project created to improve the loading speed of a website on mobile devices, by adding an “AMP” stamp to the fragments of said device. However, carrying out this idea has many challenges.
AMPs improve the performance of your site, removing all the dynamic features that are too heavy. In other words, change the design of your website providing less functionality for visitors, which can result in a decrease in conversions.
- Gravatar
Gravatars, despite being an excellent way to get your site users to interact with your publications, have the disadvantage that they affect the speed of your pages. This is not noticeable on small websites, but on those that have a lot of traffic and comments, you can notice a big slowdown in loading speed. Here are some options to fix it:
- Disable Gravatars in WordPress
- Delete those comments that do not add value
- Use some Gravatars caching tool
- Reduce the size of Gravatars images on your site
- Disable comments in WordPress
- Invalid HTML AND CSS
Using the correct HTML and CSS codes improves the performance of your site in general. Make sure these codes are aligned with W3C standards if you want browsers to interpret the information on your site more consistently.
Conclution
A slow load time will drive your customers away before they can see the content on your site. For it to work properly, I recommend that you take these 10 points into account and do your best so that by preventing these problems, you can obtain more efficient pages.
