Faster Website: Traffic Jam to many visitors my site can’t handle it

By Brandon Roach November 12, 2012

Faster Website

Build a faster website

Faster Website: Too many visitors my site can’t handle it

If your page load times on any page of your website are longer than five seconds, you might have a problem. You need a faster website.  There are many steps that can cause page loading to be excessive. This is something that should be addressed for various reasons. First and foremost it is most likely you will lose the visitor trying to access your website. This is probably the reason you built the website in the first place. An important second reason is that it affects your search results.

Faster Website: Reasons for a website not loading fast:

  • Too much traffic
  • Large media on the page (images, embedded sound, or video)
  • Bad Code
  • Iframes
  • Loading too much code
  • Bad architecture
  • Bad database design

Too much traffic is usually a good problem to have. In this case hopefully you have good infrastructure in place to handle the traffic. Cirv utilizes specific architecture for each of our clients to make this transition as smooth as possible. Usually it is just a phone call. The other end of the spectrum is we pick up a lot of clients whose website is extremely slow due to popularity and it usually is a two day process to get them up and running do to the current company they are with. Once you implement your infrastructure if the planning does not include excess amounts of traffic, it is difficult to go backwards.

Two more options that pop up due to traffic is seasonal popularity and day usage. Seasonal popularity which can derive from a Christmas driven website or other event can be handled nicely by cloud services. Cirv chooses this option for particular websites where the customer pays higher fees when there website is visited the most and the price vastly goes down during off season usage.

Time of day is tricky and you need a vendor that will talk and walk with you depending on the exactly website it is. Cloud could be very expensive and VPS might be a good solution depending on the specific needs of the site.

Large media on the site can be a problem. When I worked in Commercial Realty this happened way too often. People would just load the pictures up from there cameras and not shrink them down. If you do your own website or use open source CMS this can still happen. There are many affordable or free programs to shrink you pictures for the web and re-size them according to output size to help this problem. Also use a streaming service for your videos. I have seen people load there entire video on the page and make the user wait until it is downloaded to load the page, but make sure to never load an entire video into a web page. (This is a rare problem these days.)

Bad Code can be tested on various sites and you can see if you have particular code causing problems. Call Cirv or your web developer and in most cases is an easy and cheap fix. In a lot of industries you are forced to use a specific CMS and it can cause long page loading in this case you would need to switch vendors for the particular CMS. Most industries have various options.

Iframes are mostly used for loading content from another website into your webpage. So all the other methods of checking and fixing problems will have to be ran through the site it is coming from. Hopefully you have control over the other website or they will be willing to fix the problem with you.

Loading too much code. This is where you have to trust your developer. Some developers will not have a clue on optimization and load an entire framework into the page when they only needed one little piece of the framework. Code could be looping over and over again and would need to be addressed.

Bad Architecture from your hosting choice. An example would be the host puts too many websites on a shared server and does not have the affordability to expand, because they charged too little to begin with. Another is a shared server where one of the websites on the server is bad causing every website to be bad. Full exposure here we have taken down an entire server farm before, the host company updated their architecture after the fact.

Bad database, Database design is one of the most important features of speed. This is it’s own article but if it is due to the database there are many things that could be wrong and you would definitely need to consult with a professional. In small cases it could be that you are running on a database that was not intended for heavy use. This means an entirely new designed database.

Above is a brief synopsis of common caused problems of slow websites. Feel free to contact me about any others and I will add them.

A Better Web,
Brandon Roach