Gadgetory

I've ever been driving around a rush hour and seen an incredibly expensive supercar wondering to yourself what is the point of buying a high-performance six-figure vehicle if you can only go a few miles an hour during the evening commute well that actually tends to happen a lot here in Vancouver but no matter where you live this is probably how you feel if you've ever had a fast internet connection yet your favorite website still often takes a long time to load so in this age of gigabit fiber service 4k video streaming and massively multiplayer online games why are we still so often waiting around for pages that might only consist of text and images to hit our screens well ultimately most issues that cause pages to load slowly can be classified as some form of latency a concept we've talked about quite a few times here on tech wiki simply put latency is the delay between an input and the corresponding action something you've probably noticed if you've ever tried to watch a video with an out of sync Bluetooth speaker but when it comes to loading websites latency is often caused by something either server-side or on your own end that needs to be handled independently of your hundred megabit internet connection thus creating a bottleneck you might not be able to avoid no matter how fast your connection is one frequent culprit is a page that relies heavily on scripts such as JavaScript that require additional processing by your device you see with a reasonably fast connection it doesn't take long for a browser to understand the command to load up some text or images and place them in the appropriate spots on your screen however webpage scripts are almost like little programs that your computer has to run in addition to loading the page actual content meaning additional time is often required to process them scripts are responsible for handling certain interactive elements of webpages but perhaps unsurprisingly many of them are put there for advertising purposes add scripts both fetch ads to place on webpages and send information back to ad servers to keep track of analytics and user browsing habits so a marketer tracking the embarrassing music that you might like to listen to could be behind your favorite site loading slowly or respond slowly when you try to click on something but even if you're loading up a site that's mostly free of big clunky scripts a page can still be written poorly asking the browser to make tons of requests for different elements like scripts and images aside from the intricacies of how web pages are written another frequent source of frustration is ping the time it takes for a packet to leave your computer reach the server and the response to be returned to you packets used to measure ping time are doesn't bite so ping time really is not dependent on how many megabits per second your ISP is offering it's better to think of high ping time as another form of latency that's usually caused by a server being very far away because even though the electrical impulses that carry information over the internet travel at incredibly fast speeds they still take time to reach servers and if you're sitting in Los Angeles trying to access a server in London that amount of time is going to be noticeable any ping above about a hundred milliseconds will probably cause web browsing to feel at least a little bit slower thanks to the additional delay caused by these vast distances and although this video is about why websites load slowly this is also part of the reason why gamers prefer servers that are geographically closer to them as a ping higher than just 50 milliseconds can cause leg due to the real-time nature of many games but back to websites are there any ways that developers can get around slow loading times well yeah both by coding their pages efficiently need to cut down on how much work your browser has to do and by caching frequently accessed data through schemes like amp which you can learn about more in this video with these best practices developers can make your life a little bit easier and that's important as a recent survey indicated that 40% of users give up if a website takes just just three seconds or more to load Oh given how impatient many of us are these days I'd hate to be the developer who got kin because their website wasn't loading fast enough but you know it is fast enough fresh books fresh books cloud accounting solution is great and works anywhere with a fresh ebooks mobile app you can create professional-looking invoices on the go or snap pictures of your receipts so you don't lose them stay on top of important conversations ever miss an update see when a client has view their invoice or when an invoice has become overdue start your 30-day free trial right now at FreshBooks com forward slash tech quickie so thanks for watching guys if you like this video give it a thumbs up give us a subscribe and be sure to hit us up in the comments with any suggestions that you might have for future episodes