6 Reasons Your Website Is Underperforming

Ever wondered why your website is so slow and clunky?
A website represents a company’s public face, and its effective operation is as crucial to a positive customer experience as friendly call centre staff or rapid dispatch of orders. In a recent blog post we discussed reasons why a site might be offline, but there are also plenty of reasons why websites run slowly, irrespective of the end user’s CPU or connection speed.
These are six of the most common causes of a consistently underperforming website:
01. Scrolling homepages.
A homepage will introduce the majority of first-time visitors to your website. However, thanks to FTTP and 4G, web designers are increasingly being allowed to indulge their penchant for long homepages packed with graphics. Since many browsers (including the brand new Microsoft Edge) refuse to allow scrolling until all content has loaded, a lengthy homepage can effectively freeze or crash until the last packet of data arrives. On a mobile browser, in an area with patchy 4G, that would be enough to drive many people onto competitor websites.
02. Autoplaying media content.
It can be hard to shake a conviction, and some people are still firmly of the opinion that media content should autoplay. That’s fine if it’s a thumbnail-sized Vine on your Facebook profile, but not so good for a six-minute YouTube video on the About Us page of your corporate website. Never program videos or GIFs to autoplay – it should be up to individual visitors to decide whether they have sufficient time/connection speed/data allowance/patience.
03. Outsized graphics.
In the same way that a streaming video can damage a website’s performance, so can large graphics files. Large doesn’t necessarily relate to pixel size – it’s possible to have a BMP or RAW file with relatively small dimensions that still bogs down content display. Even JPG images uploaded from smartphones can be troublesome given today’s proliferation of 10-12MP cameras, so always compress or trim images before uploading them. Windows 7’s Paint package and iOS’s Photos app offer the ability to shave several megabytes of data from an image without significantly degrading its quality.
04. Inefficient coding.
Every stylesheet, script, image and line of text has to be displayed according to the instructions in its coding. Websites – and particularly homepages – should be stripped down to the bare minimum of components, since each new instruction increases the time a recipient device’s browser has to spend assembling the page. Lowering the number of script files and stylesheets will slash processing time, as will minimising the number of visual elements and widgets contained on each page.
05. Unreliable servers.
A second-rate web hosting company may invest all its revenue in dedicated servers for high-end clients, leaving smaller customers on flaky shared hosting packages that run slowly at times of peak load (such as mid-evening). Happily that’s not the case with VPS.NET, and even our compact virtual servers are housed in high-end data centres with always-on dependability. Page timeouts and missing graphics are simply unacceptable in the modern business world, while a powerful server can generate pages and handle requests in the blink of an eye. Server location can also play a part, which is why we have data centres in London and across Europe.
06. Database issues.
Database queries can slow a website down, particularly when visitors can eliminate certain results by checking or unchecking boxes. Think of a clothing company’s website where customers can search by size, colour or brand – each new filter potentially increases the time it takes for a single query to be completed. Optimising databases isn’t easy, but sometimes updating or removing a plugin (particularly on sites hosted in WordPress) can make an appreciable difference.
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