Website performance – speed

You want people to access your website easily… if it takes too long to load, often people will give up.  The speed at which a viewer access a website depends on many things:

The viewers side

their pc, home network, their router, the type of access  they have to the web (fialup, cable, adsl), their ISP, SPI latency for any firewalls.  Time of day may even be relevant.  I used to be on cable and when the neighbourhoods teenagers got home my access to the web just died!

In this case all websites will be affected, however you can improve your websites chances of being accessed by this person by making your website fast!

World connections

The path or route the web request takes:

the route, ie:the logical path and distance (ie number of hops, the physical length of the links etc) from the pc to the web server.  If there are limited routes from your area to other countries and a cable gets damaged (not frequent but it has happened) this can cuase congestion

Your website

Your website is made up of many bits:

• the hosting server and the load it is under will impact your site.  At the lower end scale, many websites use shared servers.  A good host will respond quickly to a load placed on the server.
• the content of your website - too many images of unnecessary large content will slow it down
• the content management system (eg: wordpress) and how it is managed, and how much content is in it.  Even a good CMS may struggle if the Database has not been well maintained.

How do you know if it is just you or whether your site is slow or down:

• check other sites in the same area
• ask friends to check your site
• Test the site on http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
• ping the site or do a traceroute to see how your request gets to the website.  If the ping does not work, the site is most probably not up.   If it works, it may be up but slow getting there.  The traceroute may show you where the bottleneck is.
• or go professional and have it monitored professionaly and regularly.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Related posts:

1. Website backups A website website owner or administrator needs to understand their responsibilities to protect their site and/or to recreate it in...
2. Video Tutorials for a Members only website These are full screen flash video tutorials – they will load in a separate tab.  They are no more than...
3. Credits for “by the people” website Anmari and BythePeople.org.za extend their thanks to the following people for allowing us to use their photographs or parts of...
4. Web site reviews So do you have a good website? Not sure? Want to know whether your designer has done a good job?...