This article will offer some tips and advice on how to improve your website’s speed
The following is a non-exhaustive list of areas you can check if you feel that your site is running slow when hosted on our Web Hosting platform.
You can also use Firefox or Chrome’s in-built developer tools to better diagnose performance issues on your website. To access these:
- Chrome: click the Options button, then select More Tools, then Developer Tools, and select the Network tab.
- Firefox: select Tools, then select Web Developer, then Toggle Tools, and select the Network tab.
Size of Webpages
We recommend that pages should be no larger than 1MB in size, this minimises the processing on the server which would allow your site to be displayed faster.
Software Platforms
Pre-built web software types, such as CMS like WordPress or Joomla, or eCommerce packages such as Zen Cart, can be very resource heavy. Depending on the configuration and add-ons installed, they can have an adverse effect of the performance of the site.
Plugins
Plugins can vary in complexity which, in turn, can increase the amount of resources that a plugin requires. A large number of plugins (for example, six or more) can also affect site loading times. In order to ensure that your site performs at its best, you should ensure that only the essential plugins are run.
Caching Plugins
On our Web Hosting platform, Caching Plugins can often cause your site to run slower, rather than faster. We recommend that you do not use Caching Plugins – unless you are on a more dedicated platform like a VPS.
Image Galleries
Due to the nature of this feature on webpages, all of the images are loaded in one go. The more images you have, the longer it will take to load, which can affect the total time a page loads.
Image Resolution
If your images are larger than the area it is being loaded into (for example, trying to load a 500x500px image in a 200x200px space) then extra processing is needed to ensure that the image fits the area properly, lengthening the time it takes to load the image. Before you upload images to your website, you should resize them to the size you require using an image editor.
Image Quality
High-quality images can increase the amount of bandwidth used on your site, as more processing power is required to draw the image onto your screen. Reducing the quality levels, without compromising the visual quality of the image will help to increase the performance of the site. For example, reducing the quality level on a JPG image by 5 levels, can help.
Database Structure
If you understand database structures, check that your tables are correctly indexed, that primary keys are defined and the data is normalised to improve its efficiency.
Database Connections
Our SQL databases can only support 10 concurrent connections, if the limit is reached, the site will either wait for a connection to open or display an error message. Ensure that the code that powers the site properly closes the database connections when it finishes.
Memory Limits/Scripts
As the resources on the shared platform are limited, the number of scripts and how much memory those scripts require need to be taken into consideration. If you get error messages, such as an ‘out of memory’ error, then you would need to reduce the number of scripts and/or plugins that the site uses.
Monitor your site performance
You can use external sites like GTMetrix or Pingdom to identify parts of your site that are not optimised and other recommendations to help your site’s performance.
Traffic
A spike in traffic, while uncommon on our platform, can affect your site. Try again in the next couple to a few hours.
External reading
Here are a few best practices that Yahoo recommend for speeding up your website: https://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
Please note: 123 Reg is not liable for the content provided by third-party websites.
Upgrade to a VPS
If you have followed the checklist above and your website still performs slowly, then it might be that your site is more suited on our VPS platform. A VPS has more dedicated resources and flexibility for more robust and resource hungry sites, click here for more information.