Why is my website slow? 10 possible reasons

There are several reasons why a web page is slow and offers a bad user experience, which in turn impacts issues such as SEO. One of the most important is the hosting of that website.

The relevance of a website to a company or a brand is constantly increasing. More and more information, more content and more applications are located there, so ensuring a good performance of the environment is crucial so that the image, or even the business itself, does not deteriorate because of a malfunction.

We are going to summarize here 10 factors that should be taken into account when choosing the hosting of a web environment, and that directly influence its performance:

1. Heavy user sessions: Each user who accesses the site or web application requires a memory capacity for the server to process their requests and deliver the content. If this need for resources is very high, the slowness of the service will become exponentially noticeable every time more users access. In this case you should review and optimize the code to make each session lighter or increase the available resources correctly (see next point).
2. Oversized server: Uncontrollably increasing the resources allocated to the same server can cause performance not to improve, since there is a turning point when they are increased too much. At that point you must consider horizontal growth, which allows you to distribute the load among several servers, optimizing and facilitating the growth of the platform.
3. Insufficient disk speed: The volume of data published, the size of the files or the number of times the database accesses disk can be reasons that slow down the Web service if the IOPS capacity (total number of I/O operations) of the disks is not correctly sized according to the needs of the environment.
4. Division of roles: Another measure that can improve the performance of the application is to distribute each service (web, databases, etc …) on a separate server. This configuration allows you to optimize each server for your real needs and distribute the load to offer a more efficient response to user requests.
5. Shared platforms: It is one of the most critical points, since hosting our web business on a shared resources platform implies that the performance of your server is conditioned to the computing demand of other clients. If your hosting provider has applied a very high overcommit or has not sized the platform well, you should consider moving to a dedicated environment since, probably, your server is not really having the resources you have hired.
6. Slow network: If your hosting provider does not have an Internet link with enough bandwidth to respond to all its customers, you can suffer slowness in the service and affect the user experience. Although no supplier with their equipment in professional data centers should have flow problems in the output network, it is a factor that can occur and that must be known.
7. Lack of monitoring and alerts: More than a problem, not having these services can lengthen the response to situations in which it is not possible to easily detect the origin of poor performance of your website. That is why we must take into account additional services that the provider can offer us to monitor specific parameters that are not analyzed a priori and that often mark the cause of the slowness.
8. Slow interconnections: Although we have explained methods to optimize the platform that hosts a web application, they are of little use if the environment is not prepared with connections between high-speed and capacity servers that avoid bottlenecks and delays in each transition.
9. Combine services: When a web platform grows and the speed of response is very critical, specific services can be added or combined to optimize the site at an advanced level. Some examples are, using the cache service for the heaviest content, the use of the Nginx service with Apache to give a faster response to requests or the combination of MongoDB and MySQL as access to the database according to the query to be resolved.
10. Inadequate provider: Last but not least, the performance of your site can also be linked to the ability and experience that your provider has to design your hosting solution and, above all, to its speed in adapting and responding to the needs that arise. Cloudways, one of best hosting provider, is running a special offer on their server, Get 40% discount for 4 months. Click on the link in description to avail the discount.

 All these points are factors that can answer why a web page is slow although, in any case, it is advisable to always have specialized professionals to know when and how to act, and if it makes sense to incorporate web acceleration services such as a Content Distribution Network (CDN) or a caching system.