Web pages are getting bigger, and that is bad news for anyone who wants to visit them. The average page weight on the web today is over a megabyte and growing at an alarming rate. But what exactly does this mean? It means that people have more work to do just to load your site in their browser.
This can take anywhere from seconds to minutes depending on the complexity of your site, your hosting provider and other outside factors like antivirus software or bandwidth limitations—all things you may not have thought about when building your website. We’re going to explain everything you need to know about page weight and how it affects your site speed.
Page weight
The size of your website is one of the biggest factors that can affect your site speed. The heavier a page is, the longer it will take to load. So if you have a lot of images or videos on your pages and they aren’t optimized for speed, this could be slowing down your site.
The same goes for plugins and scripts–the more plugins and scripts you have running on one page (especially slow ones), the slower it will be to load in general. This includes things like social sharing buttons or ad networks that are pulling data from another server instead of being hosted directly on yours or using an API key rather than loading content directly from those sites themselves (which would make things much faster).
Browser caching
Browser caching is a method of storing files on the client’s computer so the browser can access them without having to download them again. This can speed up site load times because it reduces the number of HTTP requests, which are often slow due to network latency and congestion issues.
Server response time
Server response time is the time it takes for a server to respond to a client request.
This can be affected by many factors, such as the speed of your server’s CPU and hard disk. For example, if you have a slow CPU or hard disk then this will result in more work being done by your web server which will cause an increase in server response times and ultimately affect site speed.
Hosting provider
The hosting provider you choose is a big factor in site speed. For example, if your site is hosted on an inexpensive shared server, it will be slower than if it were hosted on a dedicated server. The best hosting providers have great customer service, fast servers and good uptime (the time that the server is up and running).
Antivirus software
Antivirus software is a common culprit when it comes to site speed. Antivirus programs scan your site for malware and other threats, but these scans can be CPU-intensive. This means that your server will be working harder than usual to run the antivirus software’s processes, which takes time away from other tasks like serving up pages and responding to visitors’ requests for content.
Antivirus programs also sometimes have conflicts with other software on your server or network–for example, if you’re running a blog hosted by WordPress and an antivirus program like Avast or Kaspersky Internet Security on your computer at home (or work), then there might be some issues between those two pieces of software because they both want access to the same piece of hardware: namely your CPU! This can lead not only to slowdowns in speed but also to errors where one program stops functioning properly due to interference from another program trying to do its job at the same time as well.
Rules for photos on the site
There are many factors that can affect the site speed and the first one is the images.
The size of the images is one of the most common issues that slow down your website. The larger the image, the longer it will take to load. The best way to fix this issue is to use a tool like ImageOptim to optimize your images before uploading them to your site. That’s why it’s best to have fewer images, but to have them be of good quality, and professional corporate headshots that are in charge of the best images for brands can help you with that.
Another factor that affects site speed is how many resources are loaded on each page. If you have too many files being loaded on each page, then it will take longer for the browser to download them all and show them to visitors. This can lead to visitors leaving your site before they even see what they came there for!
Use a caching plugin
Caching is the process of storing data on your server so that it doesn’t have to be re-transmitted every time you load a page with the same information, like an image or CSS file. For example, if you want to add an image slider on your homepage but don’t want to spend hours creating one from scratch, there are lots of free plugins that will do this for you in just minutes!
This is a must-read for anyone who wants their site to load quickly. These are not necessarily the most obvious factors, but they’re definitely the ones that should be examined before opening up the developer tools and starting to tinker. Remember, speed isn’t just about page speed; it’s also about user behaviour.
