What are the most common reasons for a website being slow to load

[FBS]

I've been advised that too many requests are being sent (presumably to the server?), how can I reduce these and were else should I look to increase speed?

[Shakur]

Hi there,

There are many reasons a website may be slow, below are some of them:

1. A huge spike in Additional Traffic.
2. A Dynamic Site without caching.
3. Extremely Large or non-optimized graphics.
4. Extremely Large or non-optimized database.
5. Large amount of calls to external websites (twitter, facebook, youtube, etc...)
6. Connectivity issues

Hope it helps you

[AlexMcKee]

Your question is somewhat ambiguous. "Too many requests" could mean that your website's design is pulling in a lot of resources and this, particularly with Javascript, can cause load speed issues. If it is related to this you can look to merging some of your Javascript files, loading Javascript asynchronously where advisable, look at reducing CSS bloat (stripping unused rules, etc).

"Too many requests" could also mean that the server is suffering under load. If it is this latter meaning reducing any design-related resource loading issues may actually help somewhat but the site will still not reach reasonable speeds. To resolve this you'll need to look at reducing load on the server. This can be accomplished by making use of caches where appropriate.

Use the PageSpeed extension in Chrome or Firefox to diagnose some of the problems that might be affecting your site. If you suspect server load and if you have SSH access assuming it is a *nix machine try the "uptime" utility and have a look at the load averages.

[DeanAndrews]

Hi,

What type of website are you running i.e static html, php based such as Wordpress etc?

Cheers

[CommT]

Hi,

This is a fairly old article, but should have some good, relevant tips in nonetheless. http://moz.com/blog/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website.

You can also see speed reports in analytics - It's under the 'behaviour' menu. I think it tells you how to fix specific elements that are taking a long time to load.

Hope this helps!

Amelia