Technical issues

Does the site take a long time to load?

2014-08-29

Loading speed is one of the key factors visitors use to judge a site. It also affects whether they want to come back later. Below are the main causes of slow loading and ways to check what is going on with your site.

Why a site loads slowly

Many factors affect how fast a site loads. The main ones are:

  1. A large number of requests while the site loads, including requests to external resources (vk.com, Google services, Yandex, content loaded from other sources). The number of requests should not exceed 60-80.
  2. Large content files (high-resolution images not optimized for the web, flash content).
  3. CMS that are "heavy" for shared hosting: OpenCart, 1C-Bitrix, Drupal, etc.
  4. Unoptimized code or a problem with plugins/themes installed in your CMS.
  5. A congested connection at your internet provider.
  6. Problems on the hosting provider's side.

From the questions Hosting.Energy technical support receives, the first four causes are the most common. Optimized content and a reasonable number of requests on load do not just help you keep your visitors: they are also an important factor in how search engines rate a site.

Before contacting your hosting's technical support, make sure the site really loads slowly. Site speed testing services will act as independent judges here.

Checking with Pingdom

You can check the site's loading speed with Pingdom.

In the test results, the important values are Load Time (page load time) and Page Size (page size). Please note: if your page is larger than 2-3 MB, this can be a major reason for slow loading.

The key value is the number of HTTP requests made while your site loads. It is shown in the screenshot above, in the "Requests" column. If there are more than 80 requests, they can be considered the cause of slow loading. Each request is shown in detail just below the summary, in the "Requests done to load this page" table:

Pay attention to requests to external servers: there should be as few of them as possible, no more than 10.

Checking with Host-tracker

Host-tracker checks your site's loading speed and gives detailed results.

Checking database speed (WordPress)

During diagnostics, you also need to check how fast the database responds. A small PHP script that shows the execution time of WordPress database queries will help with this.

Open the WordPress theme folder, usually domain.com/wp-content/themes/theme_name, and edit the footer.php file. At the end of the file, before the closing </body> tag, add this line:

<!-- Queries <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?>  | Seconds: <?php timer_stop(1); ?>  -->

The result looks like this:

Load a page of your site and open its source code. At the bottom of the page there will be a line like this:

How to read these values:

  • Queries - the number of database queries run while the page loads. If the value is above 20-30, try disabling WordPress plugins one by one.
  • Seconds - the execution time of database queries. If the value is more than 1 second, also disable WordPress plugins and change the theme. Heavy database queries or a large number of queries can make execution slower.

With these ways to speed up loading, you can get high performance from your site. Do not forget about the security of your CMS as well.