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Diagnosing poor website performance

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Why should your website load quickly ?

  • A slow website can impact your Google rankings.
  • A website that is down is also at risk of loosing rankings too
  • Visitors get sick of waiting for pages to load so abandon you and go to your competitors

All very good reasons to have a site that loads consistently fast.

If you think your business website is displaying sluggishly, here’s a few tips on how to diagnose it:

Slow at times

Your web servers might be overloaded at peak times during the day, typically around 10am and 12 midday but this is specific to your industry. Servers can also bog down when they are running backups. Backups are necessary but not if they loose you sales!

Slow Pages

Just a few pages slow? Check for over-sized images on the page, or services loaded on that page that may be dependent on other sites – eg a Social Media plugin etc

Generally just slow

If your site seems slow across all pages, check it using a performance tool.We use GT Metrix website performance testing as it provides a detailed breakdown of page load related issues. Here’s a couple of examples of Performance Summary from GT Metrix:

GT Metrix website Performance Summary gt metrix good

Unfortunately rectifying some performance issues can be very technical indeed.  If the issues are buried inside your website’s CMS then there will be little you can do about it. Contact us if you encounter an issue you can’t resolve.

Coding Bugs

There is a double SEO whammy if your site has coding errors.

  1. Google considers defects as a poor user experience and there is a real risk of you loosing some ranking as a result.
  2. Often coding defects cause the page to take loader to load.

Cheap hosting costs you more than you think!

Be aware that some Content Management Systems (CMS) need more than just your cheap or average web hosting package to perform well.

Providers of low cost hosting work on a commercial model of having lots of sites all on the one server – a thousand sites on one server is not uncommon in these situations. While these hosting packages they might be OK for a flat HTML site, when loaded with multiple WordPress sites there’s a problem especially at peak times which is when you need you site operating snappily to generate sales or sales leads.

The performance problems also stem from the increased use of CMS based websites (WordPress is now used in 21.8% of sites), so even your flat HTML site might be impacted because of all your CMS neighbours on your shared web server – this will load its overall performance considerably.

You might pay 10’s of time over in lost sales for the few dollar you save on cheap hosting…

Find out:

Some of this information was sourced from Zoho Site24x7 website monitoring service which we use for Website Concierge Business and Premium websites’ performance and outages alerts.