TOP 7 REASONS FOR SLOW LOADING OF BLOG OR WEBSITE AND HOW TO FIX THEM

WHY MY WEBSITE OR BLOG IS SLOW?HOW CAN I FIX IT?

     All of us love the fast-loading websites or blog. A slow-loading websites or blog irritate the visitors and cause the bad reputation. Many factors involve to slowing down the loading of a websites or blog. Among so many new web development strategies and next generation internet connections today, Users expect a websites or blog to load faster so that they can have the best user experience.
     Google ranking algorithms also considers the loading speed as part of overall website performance. Its means that, the slower websites or blog is compared to different similar websites or blog, and this websites or blog and its articles gets hierarchically down position on the Google SERPs.
     I am sharing the most considerable 7 reasons for which websites or blog are slow-loading. The good thing is that? All of these are totally free and easy to fix.

1:   Use of too many Widgets

      Although the widgets are the easiest way to add additional functionality to your websites or blog but the most common reason to slower the loading of websites or blog is the use of too many widgets. Most of the widgets are developed by none professional developers and are not optimized for best performance.
     It is considerable that any widget, regardless of how optimized it is, slows your websites or blog down a little. The more widgets you add, the slower your websites or blog. Run the minimum amount of widgets to save your websites or blog performance.
     Especially don’t use the widgets which are taking up the most time to load because they will badly affect your websites or blog performance.

2:   Use of too many Images

     Use of images in the post make it more attractive and draw the reader’s attention but it also slow down the loading especially when not used correctly. Always consider the following few point when using images on your websites or blog:-

• Use smaller images or thumbnails on main page.
• Bigger images should only be restricted on single post specific page.
• Optimize images to less size before you upload them.
• Don’t use HTML to downsize your image instead use image optimizer tool.

     One of the major mistake that blogger do is to upload the high resolution (1024×768 or higher) image, and use the <img> tag height and width attributes to resize it to show it in small size. In this case the full image is still downloaded by your browser. If you want the image to be 250×250px, then upload it after resizing. Also minimize the number of images used on one page. Only show 1 thumbnail for each post.

3:    Lack of Optimized Theme

     Another frequent reason behind slow loading of a websites or blog is the common theme. A number of themes are available free and looks extremely nice but sad to say that several of them are very slow. Use paid version of theme it may help to solve the problem or if your are blogger? Use original theme provided by blogger as these are optimized by professional developer. Few points to optimize the theme may be include:-

• Use CSS shortcuts and write efficient code
• Avoid in-line styles
• Remove those unnecessary whitespace
• Avoid using a table-based layout and opt for a CSS / DIV based layout

4:   Gzip Compression not Enabled

     Gzip is actually a simple but powerful idea when put to use. It finds similar strings within CSS and HTML files and replaces those strings temporarily to make the overall file size smaller.
     As CSS and HTML files use a lot of repeated strings and have loads of whitespace that’s why the idea of using gzip can slow down loading time. Gzip can reduce the size of HTML and CSS contents up to 70% by compressing common strings. This must be enabled on your web server before put it in use.
     When a browser request to a web server it checks whether the server has enabled gzip and requests the webpage accordingly. If it's enabled it receives the gzip file which is considerably lesser and if it isn't, it still receives the actual page contents uncompressed version which is definitely much larger and cause slow loading.

5:   Excessive use of JavaScript

     Another general root of overall sight slowness can be JavaScript, either poorly written Script, too much use or Script that request out to external sources for too much. Wrong use of JavaScript can be a bit risky, as often only few lines of JavaScript may do actually loading a lengthy JavaScript or HTML file from external location.
     Always try to minimize JavaScript as much as you can. As compared to JavaScript, the browser renders the HTML quickly and if a widget has the both options then adopt the use of HTML. Minify JavaScript to reduce page loading time.

6:   Not Caching the Contents

     In our routine we see that when we load a web page for the very first time, it takes a little bit longer time than the second, third, etc. times that we visit that page. That’s not just accident that’s browser caching feature.

     Each browser has its own web cache, where resources like images and other web page contents are stored for easy access later on. The purpose of browser caching is to save time when requesting the same resource multiple times; it also saves bandwidth by minimizing the amount of data we request over a network.

     When our browser requests resources from a server the first time, it stores the returning resources in its cache according to this header. These resources can be of any file type, but are usually HTML, style sheets, scripts, or images. Then, when the browser needs to request that resource again, it will check its cache to see if the resource file is there; then your browser will just load that resource from cache and completely avoid having to make a request to the server. Finally, this saves you from too many requests that would likely have been made to servers.

7:   Display too many posts on Home Page

     It is also worth mentioning that displaying too many posts on home page will curtail websites or blog’s performance, particularly if you've lengthy posts or added multiple images or videos in the posts.
     When a post is rendered all its contents are fetched and this is done for each and every post. Thus, if we show fifteen complete posts on a page and a single post require 1 second to render then the home page will require fifteen seconds.

     As more posts on a page, the slower the page gets loaded. Minimize the number of the posts on home page (not more than 10)