Having a website for your small business, your freelance gig, or even just your personal purposes means dealing with web design and the problems that come with it. One particularly annoying problem with having and maintaining your website is dealing with slow loading times. Having a slow website is annoying, sure, but it can also push away potential visitors. Research shows that more than half of prospective customers leave if your website takes longer than three seconds to load and might never return if it takes more than four seconds.
Luckily, you can read on to know the five reasons why your website might be slow and the five ways you can fix them!
Lack of Caching Techniques
If your customers visit your website frequently, using good caching techniques may help speed up loading times. This is actually one of the most useful tips for advanced website design. Now, most website builder apps will have auto cache settings, but on advanced custom-designed websites caching techniques need to be manually configured.
Through caching, web browsers store often-used data in their cached memory. The next time the website is visited, the browser loads data from the cache instead of loading all the files every time. Implementing this through the browser- or server-side caching can significantly improve your website’s loading time.
Non-optimized Media
Having eye-catching and high-resolution media on your website grabs the attention of your visitors. However, if these media files are not optimized on your website, they can lead to slow load times.
There are two ways you can optimize your website media.
First, the primary way to do this is compression. You can compress any unnecessarily large media files using either lossy or lossless compression. As the name implies, Lossy compression loses much more video or image quality during the process compared to lossless compression. It will be up to you what level of detail you are willing to give up in your media files in exchange for faster website loading times.
Second, you can further optimize your compressed media files through proper tags and file names. You have to remember that Google cannot actually «see» your media files. Instead, Google reads «alt tags», which are embedded three- or four-word descriptions. Labeling your media files helps make your website load faster.
Too Many Plugins and Addons
While designing your website, you might have been excited about plugins and addons that improve your website’s functionality. Plugins and addons are good, but too much can be harmful, as with everything else in life. Using too many plugins and addons on your website can slow loading times. The more plugins and addons your website has, the more work there is for the website while loading.
If you suspect that plugins and addons are slowing down your site, you can do two things.
First, you can remove everything that is not essential to the experience you want your visitors to have on your website. Removing unnecessary plugins and addons can drastically speed up your website.
Secondly, you have to remember that not all plugins and addons are created equally. You might have used poorly designed or outdated plugins. Removing, replacing, or updating these plugins and addons can help with website speed.
Bulky Website Code
If your website has bulky code, it may load slower than intended. More code equals longer loading times.
For this problem, you can streamline your website’s code and remove the elements that are not needed. The same as optimizing your media files, your caching, and your plugins and addons, optimizing your website code can help your website load much faster.
No Content Delivery Network (CDN)
While designing your website, you might have been excited about plugins and addons that improve your website’s functionality. Plugins and addons are good, but too much can be harmful, as with everything else in life. Using too many plugins and addons on your website can slow loading times. The more plugins and addons your website has, the more work there is for the website while loading.
If you suspect that plugins and addons are slowing down your site, you can do two things.
First, you can remove everything that is not essential to the experience you want your visitors to have on your website. Removing unnecessary plugins and addons can drastically speed up your website.
Secondly, you have to remember that not all plugins and addons are created equally. You might have used poorly designed or outdated plugins. Removing, replacing, or updating these plugins and addons can help with website speed.
Now You Are Ready to Identify Possible Issues & Fixes to Speed Up Your Website
In the end, many factors may contribute to your website being slow. Many visitors to your website may have less than ideal internet speeds, different devices, different web browsers, different locations, and other factors different from those you considered while designing your website. Checking the reasons for slow website loading times will help attract and retain more customers for your website, business, and brand.
