Help Centre

At Create, page performance is always something we take in to account.  The industry average for page load across the web is 6.5 seconds, whereas an average Create website loads in 3.8 seconds on a standard broadband connection. And if you're lucky enough to have the new fibre broadband, then those page speeds are around 1.4 seconds!

However, if you feel your site is running considerably slower than this, we have outlined some possibilities as to why this might be below:

ISP Issues

Your internet provider could be having problem(s) or there could be heavy usage on your exchange. This could be due to the time of day it is, the internet is busy between the hours 3pm and 10pm, a lot of ISP's also cap their broadband speeds during these hours. The busiest time of the day for the internet, possibly the slowness period, is between 6pm and 9pm.  It's possible for your neighbours / other people using the same exchange as you to cause slowness by maxing out the exchange's limit. This usually happens around peak times as previously mentioned, but can occur at other times.

Router / Computer Issues

There could be a temporary hardware issue with your router or modem, or perhaps your network card in your computer. All of these devices can glitch sometimes and cause problems. When experiencing slow connection, it helps to unplug the router for about 12 seconds and then reconnect. You should also make sure your router, computer and any other internet devices are all fully updated, you can check if the device requires an update via the manufacturer's website or if you are a windows user, you can use Windows Update.

Software

Firewalls can obstruct the speed and access of your connection sometimes. Certain browsers are also known to interfere for unexplainable reasons, pages could time out simply because your browser made a mistake or loaded something incorrectly. It could be a recent extension installed to your browser, it helps to disable these when problems arise, just to make sure its not being effected by the extension.  Also, your Firewall or Internet Security could be blocking your internet, or the browser.  It may help to temporarily disable all your internet security to see if you notice any improvement, if you do, then you will be able to fine tune your settings to ensure they do not affect your internet speed.

HTML Fragments

Having a lot of different HTML Fragments on your website can cause your pages to load slowly. For example, if you have 'Twitter', 'Facebook' and 'Live Chat' HTML Fragments added to your website and any of these website's servers are experiencing problems or high levels of traffic, they will slow down, causing your website to be slow at loading certain fragments, and therefore slowing down the loading process of the rest of your website. It helps to disable any HTML Fragments when your website is running slowly, if your site responds more sufficiently after removing these, you then know its an external server that is currently having issues.  Generally, having a large collection of widgets on your website will slow down the loading process regardless, as the browser is having to connect to multiple servers and load content from these locations, as well as load all of the content on your website.

Responsive Website

Having a responsive website will really help in improving on your page speed. This can be actioned through the variety of the best website templates available with Create and using Content Pages to make your website. If a website is optimised for all screen sizes, this will really help speed up the page load time. 

You can test your website page speed using this great tool from Google. This tool will allow pull a report and provide areas in which you are able to work on in making your speed faster (if you have any).