What Causes Slowness in your Website

Spoiler of the article: it will end up relating the possible slowness in your web with a security problem. And is that if the loading speed has decreased drastically, the reason may be an infection in your website.

Steps to diagnose why your web is slow

First of all you should validate the behavior of your website and the symptoms. If they correspond to one of any of the following:

  • The website is slow in a rather ‘sudden’
  • Collateral actions like modified files that you have not modified

Then you can keep investigating. If not, it is likely to be due to other causes, processes, users, plugins, resources, etc. We discard as a symptom of slow web red screen because in that case you have already been infected.

At this point, the following is to rule out possible causes that have nothing to do with malware, hackers and infections. The causes of the slowness of your website can be:

  • You have uploaded very heavy content that takes time to load (videos, images, etc.)
    • Or this content has been uploaded without being optimized
  • You have installed a plugin that loads your website. You can investigate this point by inspecting the elements of your website page using the browser you use. To find this information you should know the suspect plugin files.
  • Possible rise of licit visits, you are dying of success. You can validate this point with Google Analytics.

Maybe the slowness of your website is an infection

If you’ve checked the above points and still have no explanation, we should see if you are receiving malicious traffic or have already been infected.

There are two possible cases

  • You do not manage your server: your hosting provider is likely to alert you to an increased use of your web resources. If you have already discarded all the points you can read the tools section below.
  • You manage the server: in that case you will have your own alerts and graphics about the performance of your web. Check the logs and identify any anomalies. There may have been something in your code that fired. Analyze files and make use of tools that help you clean and secure or web, like the ones we propose below.

Tools to eliminate infections or attacks that are causing slowness in your web

What Causes Slowness in your Website was last modified: August 27th, 2017 by WeSecur