When it comes to your website, speed is everything. Attention spans are falling constantly and user expectations for website response increasing, when combined these mean that for every user that has to wait for something on your site there’s a chance they will simply leave. If you find your websites is slow and unresponsive it is imperative that you not only fix the immediate issue but assess any underlying causes of such sluggishness.

If the speed and responsiveness of your website is caused by the platform, you must contact your web hosting company immediately, most hosting plans include good quality support to help you through your website issues. However in many cases the sluggishness will because by a component of the website itself which is something you need to be aware of and be able to diagnose quickly.

There is an often quoted study by the Aberdeen group that claims a one second delay in page load time results in 11% fewer page views, and a 7% loss in conversions, so as we can see for a commercial website an issue that causes it to be sluggish and unresponsive can result in a large amount of lost revenue.

You therefore need to take steps to narrow down the cause of the issue.

The first step should be to ascertain if it is page specific, or site wide, in order to isolate the element causing the problem. The best way to check this is by using a pure HTML page, either adding one specifically for speed testing, or many sites will include a readme page that serves the same purpose.

This is a good template for a page to test speed:

If a small sample HTML page such as this takes more than three seconds to load, then there is a problem with the site itself rather than individual pages, this could be the network or the server.

Obviously if it turns out the problem is hardware based, contact your website hosting company for assistance to remedy it, however, if the page loads fine whilst other parts of your site are still slow, then your investigation is just beginning.

Many issues with site speed can be traced back to database access issues, so the next step would be to test your database access through a database query as you can see here:

Make sure everything there is OK, if there are issues, you will need to refine your database queries to speed things up, if there is no issue there, the search continues.

If you are using a platform such as WordPress then plugins can be a cause of performance issues, the answer here is to disable each one in turn until you find the culprit, and either make sure it is up to date or search for a better performing alternative for the task at hand.

There are always solutions to an unresponsive website, but the key point is that it is imperative that you take action quickly, commercial websites that are sluggish simply do not perform as you would want, so never ignore an issue, find out the cause and fix it. Get in touch with us. We will be happy to help with your investigations.