All businesses have been affected by he China Wuhan Virus - COVID19. Stores that didn't have any online presence were forced to adopt with little to no experience. With little time for a proper consultation many paid as much as half a million rupees for e-commere stores. Some got what they paid for while others are starting to have issues. One of the common complaints is that the the website (especially e-commerce stores) slow down.

Reason

Before we go in to why your website slows down, you need to first understand what is a website. Let it be an e-commerce store, a blog or a simply a 3 page website - your website is a piece of software designed execute on a server and deliver the results to the end user through an internet connection.

In the case of websites there are 3 points failure.

The first is the software it self. 80% of the time this is the culprit. Software that haven't been optimized to run efficiently require more resources to do the same job vs a piece of software that has been. Some times this issue is so much so, hosting in an expensive server will not yield satisfactory results.

Then there is the issue of the server. Out of the 8 Sri Lankan websites I have analyzed in the past 4 moths I noticed 3 were running on unexpectedly slow web servers. Most of the time this is because your site was hosted in a poor shared host. Shared hosts are economical to start with, gives "Unlimited" resources but your application can barely execute on the server because too many applications (by other clients like your self) hence the term "shared hosting".

The third issue is the server internet connection. Some times websites are hosted in homes (and not proper data-centers) with slow internet connections. The quality of the servers internet connection will severely limit the number of users who can simultaneously access the website. Look at this like a small narrow road with the traffic that should go on a highway. There is going to be a lot of congestion.

The main reason why this affects e-commerce stores is because unlike normal websites they have a lot of pages (usually product pages) and search features. Unlike a normal website a single user would visit perhaps a hundred pages.

Why is a slow website bad?

You may think if you are alright with a slow website, why does it matter. Your website lives in the internet with other websites. People usually discover your website through search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. These search engines earn their money by delivering appropriate websites to users. Users don't like slow websites. As a result search engines will not rank your website in a satisfactory position. No matter how much you spend on SEO without fixing page loading times, you are going to see very poor results.

It could be so bad, your website will likely be a reason why you loose money than earn it.

How to fix?

If you website is running on a shared hosting environment, the first thing you should try is to move to a VPS - virtual private server. Generally this move improves the snappiness of your website improve load times. You can get a very good VPS server for the same price of a decent shared hosting server. Here is a list of recommended VPS providers to choose from. For about $10/mo you can get a very good server that can host a e-commerce store that can easily host 10,000 products and handle hundreds of active users in a well built site.

If this doesn't work out, your website needs optimization. Some times this is an easy job. At other times it is actually easier to build the application from scratch as it lacks the architecture to achieve desired results. It all depends on how well the website was made in the first place and cannot be concluded without looking at the source code of your website.

Finally

If you would like me to take a look at your website, I am happy to do so.