I recently bumped into a friend of mine who was complaining that her internet speeds had reduced but in essence, she was wondering why one Web page “loads up right quickly, while another takes quite a long time to come up.”
One thing is for sure, you can’t set a clock by your Internet download speed. So I did some research to find the answer to my friends issue and i would love to share with you my findings. Irrespective of the type of internet connection you are on or ISP , several
factors make one page load faster than another. It should however be noted that also there are a great many other
factors that can make the same page fast one hour (or day) and slow the next.
There are several probabilities involved in this and most of these variables are completely out of your control. But it’s still worthwhile to understand them.
So what is causing your slow load times?
Lets start with the page itself. By this i mean the page you are trying to load. Its a known fact that Pictures take more time to download
than text, also large pictures take more time than small ones. A webpage coder endeavors to make a webpage, that will take less time to load than a poorly-written one.
Next there is what they call the server. For those who never knew this, each and every web page exists on some computer–a
server–somewhere on the Internet.The big question to ask is, how fast is that server? Plus how many page requests it gets from other people, because remember you are not the only one requesting for that page at that particular time. If you have noticed in most cases your computer tends to slow down if you are running too many programs. So does a
server.
Another point to note is that, may be the web page you are trying to request for probably didn’t exist on the server before
you requested it. In most instances pages on the Web are created by a database query.
It should also be put in mind that the query speed is another potential bottleneck, especially if you have
a slow or overloaded server.
One thing we forget is that sometimes for a page to get to you, it goes
through several additional servers, and the cables connecting them. Any
one of these could be overloaded or in poor condition.
Can you do anything about it?
YES and NO?. If most pages download quickly, improving your own Internet connection is unlikely to help the slow ones.
But here’s one thing you can do. If a page seems to be taking forever, cancel it and try again. And if that fails, try again in an hour otherwise you will highly consider changing your internet provider. Hehehe kidding try the former the latter should come as an extreme measure.
