Knowing how to improve your website’s performance is important. Popular tools that help you in this are: Yslow, Pagespeed, and WebPageTest.org to diagnose poor Web page performance. For more information on using tools to determine site slowness, see Website speed tests.
The post discusses main issues responsible for making your website slow. Read about them to know how they relate to your website.
Page Size
The bigger your webpage, the longer it takes to download, and can take more time on slow connections of some countries.
Here big images are probably the number one cause of slowing down your web pages. Most image creation software has image compression options and there are also online tools, such as Smushit by Yahoo®! that can help you compress large images.
You should make sure that each image on your website is optimized to showcase on web. Also, resize images to fit the width and height you want them to display on your page. We often see people upload giant 2000-plus pixels-wide images they snapped with their digital cameras and then use the width and height parameters or fluid image options to shrink them.
Don’t do that, instead, make sure what maximum width you have given on your website and the insert images according to that. For instance: If maximum width of your website’s content area is 900px then don’t upload images bigger than that. Uploading 2000px wide image on 1300px wide website is of no use. Yes, they will take up the size of your screen if your website is responsive but still the web page will become slow as a full image is loaded before it is fluidly resized to the screen size.
Time to First Byte
We have discussed this earlier. An increased time to 1st byte means there are too many SQL queries or non-optimized SQL queries. This can also include server-side calls to third-party API.
Total Objects and Third-Party Objects
Too many objects on your webpage will require visitors’ browsers to perform the request and receive pattern too many times and slow down your page. Try combining JavaScript and CSS. Use sprites for your images. You could use mod_pagespeed to help automate this for your site.
For more information, see Which mod_pagespeed functions do you support? Also be wary of how many third-party domains you’re using as too many social buttons again slows down the website. If you use WordPress, you might want to check out the WordPress plugin Lazy Social Buttons.
Cached Objects
You want browsers caching your website. You need to instruct the Web server to enable expires headers on your static objects. This will tell browsers to cache the website.
It is not currently enabled by default on SANGKRIT.net’s Windows hosting plans but is available for all Linux based hosting plans i.e. the cPanel hosting. For more information, read Enabling mod_expires with Your Hosting Account.
Text Compression
If you don’t have text compression turned on, your page is going to be slow. We turn this on by default on our Web Hosting plans, so your if your page is suffering from this, it’s either because of third-party objects, or it somehow got disabled on your hosting account. See Enabling mod_deflate with Your Hosting Account for more information.