Some webmasters don’t regard scalability in terms of performance as something important until their visitors start experiencing problems with access. These users can be your potential customers, or employees using cloud applications for task execution. Bad performance is number one website killer, so you need to do your best to ensure that it loads quickly. Most website creators start with a quick site, but gradually speed decreases, as they grow traffic. Speed issues can take their toll creeping upon your business. Before you know it, you can lose many potential customers. How to prevent slow loading speed, and what are the reasons you may not probably think of.

You Use Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is ideal only for minor websites with little traffic: you need to share a server with hundreds, if not thousands of other site developers. Want to find out how many websites are hosted on the same server as yours? Use such a convenient tool as Domain Tools. Although the host limits the amount of resources per each website, you don’t know what activities other server users perform. Even one vulnerable or unfairly promoted website can wreak havoc on the entire server. Therefore, it’s better to avoid shared hosting to make sure that speed will never affect your project. You know that your mission-critical website will always stay online and maintain optimal performance.

Server Location

Data is transferred over fibers at the speed of light, but distance still affects website performance. If you have a website visited mostly by European users, but you host your website in Asia, you would have problems with performance. You can prevent such issues ordering a CDN service. It will provide you with tens, or even hundreds of servers around the world, and your data will be transferred from a data center located as close to your users as possible. Your content will virtually travel across wires, but cutting on thousands of miles between server and user you will boost your performance. This issue is completely eliminated with CDN server. CDNs (content delivery networks) provide you with servers across the globe, and data is transferred from a data center that is geographically close to your users. Data still must travel across a wire, but shedding thousands of miles between server and user will greatly improve your website’s performance.

You use Bulky and Old Image Formats

Although JPEG and BMP formats are pretty good for posting your images in social media, it’s not the best solution for websites that require good performance and traffic for user attraction. PNG is a more appropriate format since it can be scaled without loss of image quality. BMP files have pretty big sizes, and JPEG files cannot be changed without the loss of quality. If you still want to use large images, don’t forget to compress them: they’ll get smaller when being transferred to user’s browser, and expanded when displayed. WordPress users can consider some plugins for image compression: Hammy, EWWW Image Optimizer, Imsanity and others.

You Implement Images for Text Instead of Cloud Fonts

Until recently, displaying messages in an image was the only way to ensure that your special fonts would be shown in the user’s browser. However, when Google Fonts and other cloud fonts appeared, it became no longer necessary. If your website was established long ago, possibly, you use images to show a specialized text. It’s time to change that and start using cloud fonts: users will see the same thing you see in your browser.

Old, Unnecessary Plugins

Of course, like many other webmasters you can install WordPress plugins that seem to be interesting. However, when you don’t use them but leave active they can still sow down your website or even make it vulnerable to various threats and cyber attacks, if they are poorly coded, or cannot be properly maintained by the developers. If you don’t use, or rarely use plugins, just disable them, or better – delete them from your dashboard. Every time when someone visits your website, these plugins load pages, and the more you use, the more your performance is affected. You should install plugins that are regularly updated by developers, especially when WordPress platform upgrades.

Keep Monitoring Your Website

It’s always better to identify bottlenecks before facing fierce comments and complaints from users. Whether there’s a harmful plugin or host server overload, you can define these problems by monitoring your website. Serious problems can be defined, if you visit your website once a day and examine its speed. If you see that performance is not good enough, a CDN network will solve the problems causing speed issues. Using data centers scattered around the globe it will transfer data quickly and safely.