In the last post, we discussed possible factors stemming from wireless issues including unknown devices, signal hijackers and router technology. This post will focus on how individual websites can affect your experience when surfing the web.
Part Two: How Websites Affect Your Speed
- Using popular sites at their peak of demand – If you are using a streaming service during primetime hours or trying to check facebook at 10:00 am, then you are more likely to experience a long load time. This is because the site is getting the highest amount of requests at that time. Just as you have a connection going into your home, websites have connections that connect them out to the web. When these connections receive an especially large amount of requests, the site is likely to run more slowly.
- Heavy Sites – Some sites try to do too much. They use flash animations, draw information from multiple databases, stream video and/or load multiple images simultaneously. The problem is that while these sites might look engaging (though normally they just look cluttered), having that much downloading at once means a very long load time compared to other, cleaner-looking sites. It can also slow down other websites since all sites are received through the same cable and a heavy site that regularly refreshes itself will take a lot of bandwidth.
- Heavy sites also include high-quality video streaming sites such as Netflix and Hulu. These sites demand a significant amount of bandwidth to play smoothly and often have flash openings on the main page that can take a while to load.
- Queries – If the site you’re visiting pulls a lot of data from a database, it can take a while to create the page. If you notice that one or a small handful of pages are loading very slowly, it’s far more likely that it’s the way the site was constructed and not your connection speed that is causing the slow load time.
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Check back soon for Part III – Computer Issues