Causes of poor site performance
General industry research and research within Brightspot have isolated poor site performance to the following factors:
- Visitor's hardware—You are delivering content to an extremely wide audience, some of whom may have the latest mobile device, and others who may be running on obsolete desktops.
- Visitor's software—Visitors typically view sites in a web browser or in a mobile app. If your site is incompatible with a particular browser or browser version, the visitor may experience a performance hit. Similarly, if running an obsolete version of your mobile app, a visitor may perceive that your site is slow or not working.
- Connection type—Wireless connections appear to have matched or exceeded wired connections, but a particular visitor may be in a "dead zone" where wireless connection is poor.
- General network latency—There are times when the Internet, or your own site, is flooded with traffic, causing high resource load and subsequently reduced response times.
While all of these causes appear to be out of your control, you still need to be aware of them and make a decision if you want to account for them (for example, your site is running a big promotion that is expected to cause a large number of hits and corresponding server load). During that time, you may want to create assets with smaller payload, such as smaller images or shorter video clips.