This guide provides you with information as to why your website might be loading or performing slow when browsing certain pages..
Should you feel that your website is slow you can use tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom or Page Speed insights to provide you with a detailed report as to why.
Bear in mind, though, that these page speed testing sites are located overseas; if your site is hosted locally in South Africa, international latency may be affecting the results and your site will appear slower than when accessed locally.
There are several possible reasons as to why your site may be slow. The most common reasons are listed below:
Large Images:
Large images, lots of images or a lot of content that needs to load upon visiting the site can cause slow response times since all the content will need to be fetched from the server by your browser. We recommend scaling/reducing the size of your images before uploading them and to use image compression.
We support a web server Apache module called ‘mod_deflate’, which is used to compress data using gzip compression before sending it to the user. See How to enable GZIP compression.
Optimization:
Your site may need to be optimized. Google’s PageSpeed and Pingdom offer some great insights into how you can improve your site’s speed.
Resources:
Should your website rely on PHP like most CMS's (WordPress, PrestaShop or Joomla etc.) you would need to make sure that the resources set are enough for the website theme and plugins you have enabled.
Most themes would have a requirement list which you can get from the theme provider such as the list here. See our article on how to upgrade PHP version or resources here.
Internet connection:
Use a connection speed testing website like SpeedTest to determine if your up- and download speeds are slow overall. Also, try browsing to a couple of sites that are not cached to determine if it is only your site that is slow or whether you have the same experience with trying to reaching other sites. If your speed test shows a bad result, contact your internet service provider.
Server or Network problems: