If you are experiencing a slow website hosting performance, even it’s yours or not, there should be one of the reasons that I have listed below. A slow website hosting can hurt your business by shifting your customers away from your webpage. In the previous article, I have explained why fast web hosting speed matters, and I highly recommend you to read it later.
There can be various valid reasons for a slow website hosting performance, and in this article, I would have covered that 12 main reasons why your website hosting is slow.
So, these are the reasons why your website hosting is slow.
Table of Contents
1. Local Network Issue
Maybe it’s not the hosting server, and perhaps it’s your own Internet Service Provider (ISP) fault. Local network’s speed also matters to browse specific websites, be it DSL connection, Wi-Fi or any cellular connection. The browsing speed varies between different local networks because of the distinct “Ping.”
So try changing your internet connection or change your default DNS address with any fast “Open DNS” from your Windows Network Adapter settings.
Check Your Ping: Meter
2. Poor Hosting Selection
The selection of hosting providers matters a lot and I have been talking about this for a while. You have to make sure that you select a good web host for your website. A Cloud or VPS hosting is always better than any shared hosting plan. Make sure your host gives you more hardware power (RAM, CPU, Bandwidth, and Space) for a considerable price. The better the hardware support is, the faster the website performs.
Check: Best Web Hosting
3. Bad Server Configuration
Server configuration is the foundation of any website. If you are going to use Cpanel web hosting then you can’t do much but if you are going to build your own server then make sure to do things right. Give priority to create your website on the top of the Nginx web-server rather than Apache. Apache web-server is considered reliable and stable, but Nginx is fast and dependable. Unlike Apache, Nginx web-server uses fewer hardware resources to deliver better web performance.
Only install such extensions that are required by your application. A lousy server configuration can slow down your website speed by 30-40%.
4. High Visitors Count
A high traffic website can also cause the host to slow down. Imagine your hosting capacity is to serve only 200 real-time visitors but your site is getting par 200 and that’s a problem. It can hit your server’s CPU to its threshold range, and things will start slowing down. To eliminate this type of issue, you need to focus on point number 2.
5. High Latency
Latency (lag) means the period when your ISP sends a request to the server, and the server fulfills the request and finally send it back to you. Usually, this time period calculates in (ms) milliseconds, and the average latency of all websites is 500 ms. It is a time when a visitor fetches the first byte from your web hosting. The more is the “latency time in (ms)” the late will server responds. So less latency is always good and its a part of TTFB (time to the first byte).
The high latency is majorly affected by your server’s physical location. For example, if your website’s purpose is to get customers from the United States, but your server location is in Singapore, then this will cause high latency to American visitors. Apparently, you don’t want to do that. Therefore after selecting a web hosting provider for yourself, make sure you choose the right server location. Almost every top hosting services have the option to choose server location.
Test your web hosting latency: Hyperping.io
6. Serving External Files
External files are sub-resources of your origin resource files. In the majority of websites, there are some external file links which call Javascript and CSS to load on your webpage. These external files servers on the different host not in your origin host.
For example: If your website is serving six file links as,
https://ajax.cloudflare.com/rocket-loader.min.js
https://cdn.hostingcrown.com/06437.js
https://cdn.hostingcrown.com/38215.js
https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Chivo
https://hostingcrown.com/df983.js
https://hostingcrown.com/nobg.png
So the links that are going to hurt your page load time are
https://ajax.cloudflare.com/*
https://cdn.hostingcrown.com/*
https://fonts.googleapis.com/*
https://hostingcrown.com/*
Because each URL has a different domain name and your browser will treat them as a separate website (like if you are loading a different site on different tabs at the same time).
So after using external files in your webpage, two significant things happen
DNS Lookup
Your internet takes time to look for these external file resources even before downloading them. This time gap is known as DNS Lookup. This time adds up with your origin file resource time, resulting in more waiting time for your visitors.
More Round-Trips
Serving many external files also increases multiple round-trips performed by your internet protocol. The more the round-trips, the more the time penalty your webpage will get. Let’s understand that how a single round-trip works, an example here
- Every browser has something called “parser”, and its job is to execute files
- First of all, your browser downloads the HTML document of the webpage
- Now the browser starts parsing the whole document.
- Parser opens a connection and starts downloading the subresources (files like CSS, JS, jpeg)
- When the parser encounters an external script tag, it stops and waits until the external script is downloaded and then moves on
The “parse stop time” definitely increases the page load time and more stop time causes by more round trips. To avoid this issue, you need to minimize the usage of external file sources and try to rely on internal file sources.
7. Large Page Weight
A web page with only text can load faster than a page with lots of HD images, Flash files, Javascript, CSS or maybe custom Google fonts. These additional files have to download by the visitor using his/her own internet speed. With a slow connection, a visitor cannot download everything quickly and has to wait.
As a fact, 1 MB takes 5 seconds to download on a typical 3G network. So I would highly recommend you to lower your page size below 500kb by delivering only those files that are really essential for your page.
Check your page weight: Pingdom
8. Non-Optimize Pages
An optimized webpage is the need of today’s internet. A non-optimize page may look good and catchy, but it can drive the traffic away from you. Image hosting website Pinterest.com successfully increased by 15% more traffic by optimizing their website.
Suppose a typical size of a page is 1200 kb, but after optimizing it we can bring it down to 300 kb (that’s whopping 75% saving). Now, page optimization can be done by
- Cache everything on the webpage files for at least one month
- Minifying your HTML, Javascript and CSS files
- Combining all the stylesheets and Javascript into one
- Using async and defer in all script tags
- Removing unused CSS code from your main stylesheet
- Optimizing images by resizing and compressing
- Prefer Jpeg images over PNG because Jpeg holds less size
- Enabling Gzip level 6 compression from your web-server
These are the fundamental way to optimize your pages, but there are a lot more. So I will also try to cover the page optimizing topics on this blog. Let’s move on to the next reason.
Check your page optimization: Pagespeed Insights
9. Large Database Size
Does your website accept signups? Or maybe you have published too many posts on your blog? Well, either of these cases can comprise your website performance. When someone signups and fills his private data like Name, Password, Username, DOB, Location, etc. your database make an additional table to store the information. In the case of WordPress, all the posts and meta information saves in the database and more number of these increases the database size. Such a vast database, sometimes, is unable to handle shared web hosting servers. As a result, it may cash frequently or make your website slow.
10. Lack of CDN
Serving static files (image, videos, attached documents, CSS, js) from your parent host can put pressure on your server’s hard drive. It becomes hard for the server to serve each file to every individual when there are too many requests for these static files it generally happens because of more page views.
To tackle such a problem, we can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which takes away a load of static files from the original server to its own. In addition to this, the CDN server also serves IP based static files which is a smart way to deliver your content worldwide.
11. Using SSL
Wait, what?
Yes, we all know the importance of SSL for both SEO and User’s privacy. Nevertheless, typically an HTTPS (SSL) connection takes 5.5 round-trips (as I explained in point number 6) which is about 170 milliseconds even with a good internet connection. However, I will suggest you ignore this factor and not try to remove your SSL certificate (if you have one installed). I gave this information just for the knowledgebase.
12. Too Many Ads
Advertisements are a comprehensive way to monetize your content, but displaying too many of them can exterminate your web host’s performance. If it is a static Ad, I will give it a pass but not a dynamic Ad network like Google Ads.
Ads are a good friend of every webmaster and serving fewer of them can beneficial for both webmasters and visitors. A page with one or two ads loads very fast.
Your Turn
Next, we have also listed some of the fastest web hosts for your online business, it’s highly recommended to check it. Also, let us know which reason has described your slow web hosting problem best.