User Side Factors

There are a lot of user side factors that can affect the performance of a website and the computer system. The user side factor that can affect the performance of the website can be the download speed and also for the user side factor that can affect the computer systems is the browser, cache memory and the processor speed.  

Download Speed

The download speed of website can be down to what the computer system is downloading, such as media of the internet or it can be web page. The speed of downloads can be affected by many thing such as

·         Viruses

·         The size of the processor

·         The size of the file that is being downloading

·         How many webpages are being open

·         The internet connection that is being used

All of these can play part in how fast the download speed will be.

For example if the size of the file that is being downloaded is 5 GB, the download speed will be very slow because of the size of the file, which will slow down websites from opening.  

PC Performance Factors

More factors that can affect the performance of a website can be browsers, cache memory and the processor speed. As there are many different browsers that are used to display web pages, the most common are Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Apple Safari and Mozilla Fire Fox. The performance of a website can depend on what browser is being used because there is a something called browser speed so one browser is faster than another. For example Google chrome is faster than Mozilla Fire Fox because Google Chrome has better resources than Mozilla Fire Fox, so Mozilla Fire Fox will have to spend time trying to use different resources. Cache memory is another factor when speaking of the performance of a Pc or a website, because the cache memory stores the data of different website that the pc has visited. So that when that webpage is visited again the user data that was saved will automatically be there ready to use, the more cache memory the pc has the data will be saved. But once the cache memory is full the performance of the pc will become slower, so to stop this from happening the cache memory should be clear of all data that is not needed on the user pc. The speed of the processor plays a big factor in the performance of a pc and website, because the processor deals with how fast the information is processed. So to keep the speed of the pc fast it is better to have a faster processor, this will make opening webpages on browsers faster.

Server Side Factors

The server side factors are more likely to affect the website performance than the user side factors, because the way how the website is hosted and maintained. Will affect the performance of the website, the main server side factors are web server capacity and file types.

Web Server Capacity

Web server capacity involves of three things which are available bandwidth, executions to be performed before page load and number of hits. Available bandwidth is how much data that can be downloaded from a website; bandwidth is a very important factor in the performance of a website. So with a bigger bandwidth the more data you would be able to download from a website. An execution to be performed before page loaded is more to do with the code of the website. If a website is opened the code that was used to make the web site will be performed, if there is more coding it will take longer to load the website. So if the website coding is short and simple, the request of the website will be performed faster. If many people are on a website all at once, the more the website will have to put up with the demand. This can result in the website becoming slower, which can end up making the website crash. The term that is used for the amount of people visiting a web site is called number of hits.  

File Types

There are also different file types that are used, that can affect the performance of a website. The different file types are Bitmap, Vector, Jpg, Gif, Wav, Mp3, Avi and Swf; some of these file types are used for images, music and videos. The file formats which are used for images are Bitmap, vector, Jpg and Gif. These are all used in the making of a website to add images to the web page, depending on the browser it may have lower support and compatibility with some of the file formats for images such as vectors. So for some browser other image file formats will have to be used in order for images to appear on the webpage on a browser. For sound the main file formats that is used are Wav and Mp3, some browser are not about to support some sound file formats. So when making a website it is good to use these two file format when input sound into a webpage because they are support by most of the browsers. For videos the most used video file format that is used is Avi because it is supported by all browsers, so people viewing the website would be able to view the video. A file format that allow for multimedia is Swf, Swf was created by Adobe Flash. It is a multi-functional type of file format so this means that it is about to save images, videos, sound and animation; this file format allows the website designer to put animation on to the website that they are creating.