The importance of being (the) fastest

The slowness of a site is undoubtedly one of the main reasons for dissatisfaction for a user. This is why it is essential to reduce as much as possible the time a website takes to load a page and react to the inputs of those who surf it. This is a very important aspect: on the web even a single second can make a difference. In fact, a slow site has a very high bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave it after visiting a single page): a factor that, among other things, penalizes a portal in the eyes of search engines.

To help publishers provide the best possible experience for their users, there are tools that measure the speed of a website, some free, some paid. They analyze the main performance metrics of a portal and the main problems to pay attention to, which are mainly four:

• resources that take too long to load, such as heavy fonts and images;
• TTB (time to first byte) and FMP (first meaningful paint), which indicate the time when a site starts loading and when it starts displaying information;
• the loading time, the number of requests and the size of the page, factors that can significantly increase the loading time of a web page;
• HTTP headers, the way in which browsers communicate with the server by sending information back and forth via a request or response.

But what are the main reasons why a site loads slowly? We list nine of them here, with related suggestions for correcting them.

Non-optimized images

The most common reason behind the slowness of a website is the large presence of high resolution images. They can consume a lot of bandwidth during their own upload. The format of the images is also a factor to consider, as we have had the opportunity to tell in one of our previous articles. Our advice is therefore to always check the size of the image files, preferring the new .webp format to .png and .jpeg.

There are several tools for compressing .jpeg files, transforming them into .webp. Let's think, for example, of WebPonize for Mac and Webpconv for Windows.

Problems with JavaScript

JavaScript / jQuery plugins have made it useful and convenient to add dynamic content to websites. However, if implemented incorrectly, JavaScript can slow down page loading speed. Always check your JavaScript scripts to see what you really need and remove what you don't need.

Too many HTTP requests

Having a lot of JavaScript, CSS, and image files can lead to a large number of HTTP requests. During the visit of the users, in fact, the browser makes several requests to load each of these files. One method to reduce them can be the use of Sprite. They are collages: in practice, multiple images are grouped within a single file, which are then extracted through the use of CSS. Even if it should be heavy, a file consisting of several images will still be lighter than the sum of the individual files that compose it.

Failure to use Caching techniques

It is known that caching greatly improves the performance of websites. This is a technique that allows you to store frequently used data in memory. Any subsequent requests for the same content are made available from the cache, effectively speeding up the data retrieval process. By implementing browser / HTTP caching and server-side caching, you can achieve a tremendous improvement in the performance of your site.

Unclean code

One of the biggest culprits of a site’s slowness is the unclean code. During programming, excess whitespace, empty lines, unnecessary comments can make a site heavy. Removing these unnecessary elements significantly reduces the overall page load time and improves the portal's SEO performance. In technical terms, this process is called minimization.

Failure to use gZIP compression

By enabling gZIP compression, the server is instructed to insert all Web objects (images, CSS, JavaScript files, etc.) in a single container, before sending to the requesting browser. This compression reduces response times, as it reduces the size of the data transferred between the site server and the users' browser. Enabling gZIP compression is therefore a fundamental step to increase page loading speed.

Too many advertisements

Advertisements: essential for monetizing, a double-edged sword if used incorrectly. Too many advertisements, in addition to discouraging users from continuing to visit, can compromise the performance of a website. An example is undoubtedly the addition of HTTP requests, which require additional processing time. Especially rich media ads, such as pop-unders, interstitials, can create hundreds of requests and slow down or even cancel your site's response speed. Limiting the number of display ads therefore ensures better performance.

Failure to use a CDN service

A CDN service is a network of independent servers distributed in different geographic locations, in order to deliver web content to users with high performance and availability. It allows you to serve visitors to a site from the node located in the available data center closest to its geographic location, reducing RTT, the round trip time.

Bad hosting

The right web hosting service provider makes a huge difference in relation to the performance of a website. The fault of the below-average page loading speed could in fact not fall on a Publisher: if all the causes described so far have been corrected and the website should still be the protagonist of negative performance, changing hosting providers could be the solution for all the problems.