The time for loading a web site depends mostly on:
1. The number / size of external resources included in the site;
2. Properly resized images to their visible size;
3. The database queries executed while the site loads.
Examples:
- You have included RSS feeds on your page(s). In order to display the RSS feeds, your web site needs to retrieve them from remote servers. As each connection to a remote server takes some time, the more RSS feeds a page has, the slower it will load.
- You have a picture with dimensions of 1024x768, which is 1MB, and a small thumbnail that shows a preview of this picture. It is a common mistake to use the same unresized large image as the thumbnail. The proper action would be to resize the large picture to a smaller image that matches exactly the size of the thumbnail in pixels.
- You use database-driven application for your website and have added many modules for additional functionality. Some of them are not even very popular and you are not sure how well optimized they are. Others you do not even use actively any more, but you have not removed them after testing them initially. The additional modules will generate database queries at each visit to your website. If these queries become too many or some of them need too much time to be executed, your website will load slowly.
In order to speed up your site we recommend:
- Decreasing the number of external resources on your site.
- Optimizing the size of the images used on your website.
- Decrease the number of additionally installed modules / components for your application.
- Decrease any additional / extra features in your site like searches, statistics and others.
- Check the internet for specific optimization instructions for the application you are using.
