Our website is loading slowly

Maintaining a rapidly loading website is an increasingly crucial factor for user experience and search engine optimization (SEO). As real estate websites continue to evolve and become more complex and content-heavy (including high-resolution images, 3d tours, video and more), if your page load time is slow, it affects user experience, bounce rate, search performance, and revenue.

Our development team and server administrators utilise several performance tools to ensure your website loads quickly for all users, including: 

• New generation, locally (dedicated) hosted servers with AWS (Amazon Web Services)
• Global CDN (Content Delivery Network) acceleration with Cloudflare
• Multi-level caching (server side and client side)
• Static content compression
• Lossless image compression
• Latest generation javascript libraries and PHP versions.
• Brotli compression - Speeds up page load times for your visitor’s HTTPS traffic
• Enhanced HTTP/2 Prioritisation - optimises the order of resource delivery, independent of the browser
• HTTP/3 (with QUIC) - Accelerates HTTP requests by using QUIC, which provides encryption and performance improvements compared to TCP and TLS
• 0-RTT Connection Resumption - Improves performance for clients who have previously connected to your website
• Cloudflare Argo smart routing - Improves latency by more than 30% and connection errors by 27% on average
• Cloudflare Mirage - Improves load time for pages that include images on mobile devices with slow network connections
• Latest generation image formats (i.e. webp)
• Code minification
• Best practice coding standards and package compilation
• Rate limiting, load balancing and security rules to prevent DDoS attacks and aggressive bots (which impact load times while excessively polling website pages)
• Real-time performance monitoring/alerts and autoscaling
• And much more!

It's safe to say we take website load times very seriously and always look for new ways to improve as new technology and techniques become available. 

There are many different factors that affect page load times, and our teams make a continued effort to ensure that your website remains lightning-fast for legitimate visitors. 

In the unlikely event that our servers experience an outage or performance degradation due to a network issue at AWS and outside of our control, this will affect multiple clients. We will always promptly alert you to any such issues and keep you updated on the issue's status.

99.9% of the time, reported slow page load times are related to an issue with the device or network that your visitor is using to access your website. 

Steps to troubleshoot a page load time issue

1. Perform a speed test on the device experiencing load time issues -> https://www.speedtest.net/. If the internet download speed is low, due to an issue with an internet service provider OR your visitor is using a lower-tier internet subscription or degraded connection (i.e. 3G), this will impact website page load times considerably. Click here to view the latest broadband performance data from the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission). 
2. Try loading your website via multiple devices as well as disconnect from any/all WIFI networks and load the page from a different network i.e. your 4G or 5G mobile network. A busy (or rate-limited) WIFI network can impact on website page load times.
3. If a VPN (Virtual Private Network) is being used on the device, try turning it off. Some VPN's (especially free VPN's) apply rate-limiting or they can become congested by other users on the network, causing slow page load times.
4. If the page is loading faster on one device over another, this points to an issue on the device itself, caused by one or more of the factors above. 

Stepps development team cannot assist with troubleshooting individual devices or networks outside of our control.