5 Reasons Your Website Speed Is Slow And How To Fix It

Cheap web hosts usually hand you in a shared server which significantly reduces the speed of your site. Opting for a high-quality web host may be a pricey option, but it will prove to be a great value deal in the long run. Some of the best hosting providers include InMotion Hosting, Hostgator, and Bluehost.

#2 Non-optimised Images

Extra-large images, as well as an excessive number of them, can prove to be a real nuisance when it comes to page loading speed. Luckily, there are ways you can solve this issue.

First of all, choose formats like JPG, PNG, and GIF (in that order) while avoiding BMPs and TIFFs. Next, you should crop them to an appropriate size so they load faster.

Finally, you should opt for reducing the size as much as possible while maintaining the quality level.

#3 High Traffic Volume

As much as you would like your website to have a high traffic volume, it can give you a real headache in terms of page loading speed. As it’s the case with brick-and-mortar stores, if more people come to your store at once, your staff will need more time to serve them.

Your website works the same way. While there’s no easy way to solve this problem, you can take care of all the other aspects and turn high traffic slowdowns into a neglectable nuisance. This article is a good reference for things you should consider when running a high-traffic website.

#4 Server Proximity

This may not seem like a big issue, but when traffic determines your sales percentage and your website’s popularity, every second count. The problems occur if your website’s server is located in Australia and a person from the US tries to access it.

Since, it takes some time for the data to travel, there’s a possible delay in page response time. This issue is easily resolved by creating a Content Delivery Network or CDN. CDN basically stores your website’s location in a cloud closer to the user’s location so they can access it faster.

#5 Clogged Backend

If you are familiar with CSS, HTML, or Javascript, you are well aware of what happens in the backend. For instance, Google had around 2 billion lines of code in 2015.

Although your website won’t get anywhere near that number, a dense code can significantly slow down your website.

In order to speed up your website, you need to compact your code by removing redundant spaces, line breaks and, indentations. Finally, you can implement GZIP compression to reduce the file size without sacrificing the quality.

3 Ways a Slow Website Affects Your Business

We all know that site loading speed is a ranking factor for a long time now. In addition, Google announced that as of July 2018, website speed will become a significant factor for mobile searches.

This means that if you want your business to succeed, you can’t afford to have a slow website. Let’s dig in and see the main consequences of having a slow website.

Losing Money Through Reduced Traffic

First and foremost, since you have probably created your website to generate traffic and consequently a steady income, the speed of your website is in direct correlation with traffic volume and profit generation.

It is reported that every second of delay in page response time will lead to a conversion reduction of 7%. Since the competition is even more fierce now that it was back then, the number is reasonably higher nowadays.

It’s a vicious circle because having a slow website means people will bounce away from your website. As a result, both your website’s SEO parameters and your wallet will have to bear the consequences.

Bad User Experience (UX)

User experience or UX is one of the main factors for both search engine rankings and conversion rates. Whether your website operates as an e-commerce store or in any other industry, you will need to keep your visitors happy.

However, delays in page response time have the exact opposite effect on visitors.

A lower user experience will show through your website’s bounce rates. If the bounce rate is high, one of the main reasons is probably the website’s speed.

Losing Mobile Users

Judging by the fact that smartphones are taking over the market by storm, it is obvious that mobile users should be your target audience.

However, mobile shoppers tend to be more demanding and impatient since convenience is the top trait of smartphone devices.

Having a website that is slow and not optimised for mobile phones means you will fail to reach out to a huge group of people. If your website doesn’t rank well in terms of page loading speed and doesn’t load on smartphones, you will be missing out a huge chunk of the market.

Conclusion

Your visitors can abandon pages due to slow load times. If you are investing in marketing your website, optimising your website for SEO, or running PPC campaigns for your website, then you must have a good infrastructure to support high traffic.

In order to create a good user experience, monitor your site regularly and make necessary changes. If you need any assistance in maintaining your website, get in touch with us.