It is not only bad for users, but the search engines don’t like slow websites either

Everyone knows some websites are slower than others. There could be many reasons, but one thing is for sure your visitors won’t stay around for long if it’s too slow.

What is the cause?

Often you think it’s your local connection, or some sort of congestion on the web. In fact quite often it’s neither of these, but simply the fact that the website you’re trying to view is running too slowly.

More than once I’ve visited a client and have mentioned I found the website seems a bit slower than it should be. Often they say, they’ve noticed as have their visitors, but don’t seem to think they can do much about it.

Too many large images files?

There are quite few reasons why a website could load more slowly than it should. Maybe there are too many large images (file size is too big) and these are slowing the page down. At least this is something you can resolve quite easily by making the images smaller or reducing their resolution.

Check out your web host

If you’ve don’t think it is your connection it could be because the Internet server your site is running on has too many sites on it or is overloaded with traffic. If this is the case you’re going to need to contact your website host and ask them to put your site on a faster server.

Use these tools to check out your website

There is a tool that can test your website speed called Pingdom. All you need to do is click on the link, enter you full web address in the box and press “Test Now”.

Pingdom will give you a list of all the items that are loaded when your web page is opened and from this list you can identify anything (such as a big image) that is slowing things down. Try this tool with several other similar websites to yours and see how they compare.

If there is no obvious problem with the Pingdom test then it may be the actual web server itself that is running slowly. There is a website speed test tool from iWebTools, that will illustrate how fast your server is running. Red results are too slow and blue are fast. Try it several times a day for a few days and if there is still a problem contact you hosting company and ask them why.