Have you ever been driving around in a rush hour and seen an incredibly expensive supercar, wondering to yourself what is the point of buying a high-performance six-figure vehicle if you can only go a few kilometers an hour? Well, this actually tends to happen a lot. This is probably how your users must be feeling when they have a fast internet connection, yet your website still often takes a long time to load. 

In today’s world of superfast fiber service, 4k video streaming, and massively multiplayer online games, we so often wait around for pages that might only consist of text and images to hit our screens. As per our observation, most issues that cause pages to load slowly can be classified as some form of latency. Latency is the delay between an input and the corresponding action. For example, you must have noticed the delay while trying to watch a video with an out-of-sync Bluetooth speaker. But when it comes to loading websites, latency is often caused by something either server-side or on your users’ end that needs to be handled independently of a 100 megabit internet connection. Thus creating a bottleneck user might not be able to avoid, no matter how fast their connection is. 

One frequent culprit is a page that relies heavily on scripts, such as JavaScript that require additional processing by devices. With fast connectivity, it doesn’t take long for a browser to understand the command to load up some text or images and place them in the appropriate spots on the screen. However, web page scripts are almost like little programs that a computer has to run. In addition to loading the page’s actual content, meaning additional time is often required to process them. Scripts are responsible for handling certain interactive elements of web pages. However, many of them are put there for advertising purposes. Ad scripts both fetch ads to place on web pages and send information back to ad servers to keep track of analytics and user browsing habits. Even if you’re loading up a site that’s mostly free of big clunky scripts, a page can still be written poorly, asking the browser to make tons of requests for different elements like scripts and images. 

Aside from the intricacies of how web pages are written, another frequent source of frustration is ping, the time it takes for a packet to leave the computer to reach the server, and the response to be returned. Packets used to measure ping time are very small, just a few dozen bites. So ping time really is not dependent on how many megabits per second the ISP is offering, it’s better to think of high ping time as another form of latency that’s usually caused by a server being very far away. The electrical impulses that carry information over the internet travel at incredibly fast speeds while also taking time to reach servers. Any ping above about 100 milliseconds will probably cause web browsing to feel at least a little bit slower thanks to the additional delay caused by these vast distances. 

Are there any ways that can help you get around slow loading times?

• By coding your pages efficiently to cut down on how much work your browser has to do. 
• By caching frequently accessed data through schemes like the amp. 

With these best practices, you can make your life a little bit easier and give your users the responsive experience they deserve.

Hope you use our suggestions on how to make the website load faster, else you can always reach out to us and we will happy to assist you.