How to identify the 6 most common speed problems

Although you consider it impossible, analyzing the performance of your website does not take much time. Using the appropriate tools and interpreting the results well, we will find the main problems of our website immediately.

Below we describe the 10 most common problems that the boys of yotta.

Most tools stand on two different legs to perform an analysis: they focus on content, and they consider geographic distance. Regarding the latter, there is usually no evidence from Argentina or Latin America, but With Webpagetest you will be able to execute the tests from Argentina to be able to consider the speed as your clients perceive it.

For the examples below, we will use the performance report of Page 12.

1. Poor backend performance

The first line of details It shows us a kind of "waterfall" with the detail of each downloaded item. Optimally, it should be very short, since it is the time it takes for the server to return the request. Although there are always exceptions, if this is greater than 1 or 2 seconds, you should consider an action plan to improve it.

2. Lots of files

This context is typical in news sites or some blogs with buttons for facebook, twitter and other social networks. Yes to see the details you have to scroll down a lot, you have too many files! The typical average is 47, although in some cases narrowing this down can be tricky. However, we recommend that you bear in mind that an excessive number of calls per page threatens the charging speed, unless your site has http/2 (you can get your SSL certificate with http/2 here!).

If in your case most of the files are social network buttons, you can take advantage of the technique of lazy load, used in large portals such as TechCrunch either Masable and that we recently implemented in our Onyx client, the blog of Santiago Bilinkis. If you use WordPress, the recommended plugin is WPSocialite together with W3 Total Cache to compress your CSS/JS.

3. Problematic file

Here's an easy one: look for the longest bars in the detail. It is possible that some of these files are bottlenecks, and slow access will cause the entire site to load more slowly. In general, these are GIF or PNG image files, but we also often upload JPGs that are poorly optimized or that are too large in size. Pay attention.

There are multiple reasons for this to happen, but it seems that Page 12's advertising system is not working properly.

4. Connection problems

This may also prove slow when accessing the site from other countries. In our example, we did not find any type of problem since the site is hosted in Argentina, but if you see other examples of pages hosted abroad, you will find cases where delays occur.

5. Slow download

Complementing point #4, there are cases where the slowness in downloading the file has nothing to do with the connection speed of the server where we have it hosted, but because of the weight of the files. In our example case, the basic optimization options, such as GZIP and image compression, are correctly implemented. If you have WordPress, we recommend the plugin EWWW Image Optimizer which is 100% compatible with our plan Onyx.

6. JavaScript behavior

Ideally, all files should load almost simultaneously, but in most cases this does not happen. If you notice any javascript that is slowing down the loading of the site, make sure you are using asynchronous javascript so that it can be loaded without slowing down the loading of the site.

In the case of Google Analytics, the change It was announced It's been a few years now, but it doesn't hurt to make sure we're using the updated version for tracking our sites.

Don't know where to start to speed up the loading of your site? Leave us your comment, or consider migrating your site to Duplika. You can count on us for the implementation of any of the improvements detailed, and more.