Finding that your website is slow can be discouraging and scary. If a visitor leaves your site because the loading time is too long, there’s no way of winning these people back. You’ve just lost out on a potential sale or lead. Identifying why your website is slow should be one of the first steps in any speed optimization process. In this post, we’ll look at some reasons why websites are slow and how to fix them.
1. Unoptimized Images
If your website had a large volume of unoptimized images, it could be affecting your website speed. High-resolution images consume a lot of bandwidth, especially when loading. It’s important to optimize images for fast loading in order to make sure people have the fastest and best experience possible on your website.
How to Optimize Images for the Web:
- An image should be less than 1Mb to keep page load times reasonable
- Choose JPEG instead of PNG, especially for larger images.
- PNG files are best suited for images with transparency and complex colors like logos
- Good file names are a necessity that should be followed
- Make sure your image has an alt tag!
- Keep the image ratio preserved when resizing images.
2. JavaScript Issues
As the popularity of JavaScript frameworks increases, so do the number of scripts being added to a web page. This can result in a serious performance hit.
If you want to make sure your website is loading as fast as possible, then you need to take steps to optimize it. JavaScript issues are a common cause of slow loading times.
Here are some tips for reducing the impact of JavaScript on your site:
- Take frequent inventory of your site to see what you really need. Remove any JavaScript scripts that aren’t required for your website. If possible, switch from using multiple separate scripts and get everything from a single source such as Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel Code.
- Consider switching to a single script for all your tools. This will reduce the number of HTTP requests required and make it easier for search engines like Googlebot to index your content properly without having to crawl through multiple pages on your site just to find all its content and links.
- Hire a speed optimization service if you still have problems with loading times after following these steps above or if you want professional help optimizing your JS code
3. Excessive HTTP Requests
You’ve probably heard about how so many HTTP requests can destroy your website performance; but sometimes you don’t have a choice because of the type of content you are working with. This is usually the case when you have a lot of JavaScript, CSS, and image files in your backend. Even if we remove all of these files from the HTML and place them in external files, we still need to load them individually with several HTTP requests.
If you have excessive HTTP requests on your site, you should reduce them using a 3rd party service. Talk to your web developer about reducing the number of files on a page including CSS, images, and JavaScript. You can also reduce the number of HTTP requests a user needs to download by reducing the total number of CSS and JavaScript files they need to download.
4. Too Many Ads
Online advertising is a great way to monetize high-traffic websites. Having too many advertisements on your website, however, can ruin the user experience. Excessive advertising is bad for conversion rates and too many HTTP requests slow down your site.
But you don’t want to lose money either, so it’s important not to go overboard when it comes to ad placement. Rich media ads like pop-ups and automatic downloads are particularly damaging. Not only do they make your website impossible to navigate, but they’ll also hurt your bounce rates and decrease the amount of time people stay on the site.
Too much advertising can also make your site look tacky. You don’t want a bunch of distracting banners or popup ads to distract from the content of your site. Instead, try limiting the number of ads served on your website as much as possible. It’ll help with speed optimization and conversion rates, too!
5. Bad Hosting
Hosting is an essential part of running a website, but it can also be one of the most frustrating parts. You may have heard that you need to choose a good host, but what does that mean?
Most of the time, website performance problems are caused by poor hosting. If your site is loading slowly or not at all, it could be due to a host that isn’t equipped to handle high traffic.
By choosing a more expensive option with more resources available, you can guarantee that your website will perform well even when you reach peak traffic times.
A good hosting provider should also offer managed services and optimization tools such as caching and compression to help improve page load times and reduce resource usage.
6. No Content Delivery Network
A CDN is a network of servers located in different geographic locations and connected together by high-speed links. This network allows your web content to be displayed to visitors with high availability and performance. Depending on your visitor’s geographic location, the requested content is served by the node located at the nearest available data center. This helps minimize round-trip time and serve content in a must quicker fashion.
If you don’t have a CDN, you may have a website that loads slowly. When you open your website in a browser, the browser needs to communicate with the server first to open it. Since CDN data has a shorter distance to travel between the user and your server, it undoubtedly helps your site load more quickly. Without a CDN, the communication between the browser and server can take longer.
7. High Website Traffic with Low Bandwidth
The amount of bandwidth you need depends on the type and size of your business. A small business may need to accommodate a few hundred visitors at once while a larger business might need to accommodate thousands or even millions of visitors.
High website traffic can easily slow down your website’s loading speed. Although information moves quickly online, websites can only accommodate a certain number of visitors based on their bandwidth. If there is low bandwidth, a significant number of visitors can slow down your site substantially.
Bandwidth refers to how much information an Internet connection can handle in a given time. Most commercial businesses deploy larger bandwidths that are referred to as broadband. This helps deliver information more quickly and accommodate more visitors to your site. Smaller businesses, on the other hand, typically have a lower bandwidth, which can limit the information transferred through your Internet connection.
8. Overloaded Database
The last thing you want to do is slow down your website, but that’s exactly what happens when you have an overloaded database. The excess data stored in your database can cause significant problems for your site’s performance.
This is common for websites that have been live for a significant time. In these cases, useless data is more of a problem than anything. For example, information stored from WordPress plugins can remain in your database after a plug-in is removed.
When your database keeps growing, your website slows down, and its performance is affected. Your database file can grow several gigabytes at a time. Your page load time can increase by 10 seconds or more. If you are working on speed optimization, you must clean and optimize your database periodically.
- Optimization should be part of your maintenance routine
- Make sure your SEO team removes unnecessary records from the DB so you don’t get an overloaded one.
- To avoid WordPress being overloaded, consider activating the Clean Options of Plugin Garbage Collector plugins.
- As you grow your database, keep a close eye on the structure.
- Cache popular queries
- When possible, avoid using Flash files
Why should you use speed optimization services?
Speed optimization services will help you eliminate any technical issues that may be slowing down your website. The longer it takes for a site to load, the fewer users will stick around to complete their purchase. Keep your visitors happy by providing them with an optimized user experience.
So, are you ready to speed your website up? Take a close look at your site – is everything working properly? Do you need a CMS migration or a redesign of your current website? Contact our team at Funtastic WD for more information and pricing on a complete website development solution for your business.
