A slow website is a disaster for your business in the fast-paced digital world of today. People using the web want to have their pages up in the shortest time possible. If it does not load quickly, they would leave the page and head to a competitor’s website. Fortunately, several things can cause this slowdown and identifying the causes may enable you to move forward towards a solution. Let’s examine a few of the most common culprits and how you can fix them to increase the performance of your website.
1. Large Image Files
Large file sizes of images are the most significant cause of slow speed loads on your site. Huge images and retouched images can make your website feel slow due to increased loading times.
How to Fix It: Before uploading images to your site, optimize them using compression tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim. These tools can reduce file sizes without compromising quality. Additionally, choose the right formatsโJPEGs work well for photos, while PNGs are great for graphicsโto strike a balance between quality and size.
2. Too Many HTTP Requests
Every element on your page – images, stylesheets, and scripts – counts as requiring an HTTP request. The more, the longer it takes to load.
How to Fix It: Reduce the number of elements on your page. Combine your CSS and JavaScript files wherever possible, and consider using CSS sprites to reduce image requests. Opting for a minimalist design will also help reduce the number of elements your page has to load.
3. Browser Caching Not Turned On
Each time users visit your website, their browsers download files like images and scripts. Without browser caching, return visits are likely to have longer load times.
How to Fix It: You should activate the browser caching by setting specific file types with expiration dates. That way, certain elements of your site will be cached on users’ browsers. So the next time they access your site, their browsers will load the files already cached instead of downloading them. You can do this on your web server or using plugins if you’re on WordPress.
4. Not Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
If your readers are located everywhere in the world, your site will load much, much slower for people geographically far from it if stored on one server.
How to Fix It: Use a Content Delivery Network. A Content Delivery Network provides your website’s content to browsers via multiple servers that spread around the world. Upon accessing your site, it loads content from the closest server to the one which accessed it, so in turn, reduces load time. Some of the best CDNs include Cloudflare and Amazon CloudFront.
5. Over-reliance on Plugins
Although plugins could add really cool features on your website, too many might slow it down. The more scripts and styles loaded, the slower it might load.
How to Fix It: Review all of your plugins and deactivate or remove those that you seldom use. Keep only those which really enhance functionality. Also, ensure that the plugins that you retain are well-coded and frequently updated.
6. Unoptimized Code
Another speed killer is heavy, messy code. This includes unnecessary characters, spaces, and comments in your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
How to Fix It: Minify your code by removing unnecessary characters and spaces. There are plenty of tools and plugins to automate the process, which keeps your code lean and efficient.
7. Not Choosing the Right Hosting Provider
Your web hosting provider is an important factor in the speed of your site. Using a cheap or shared hosting plan may leave you without the speed and reliability you require.
How to Fix It: Invest in a reliable hosting provider that suits your website’s needs. If you expect heavy traffic, then you should go for options like Virtual Private Server (VPS) or dedicated hosting, which gives you better performance and resources.
Conclusion
A slow website can frustrate your users and lose them as customers, which can eventually affect the bottom line. If you know these common mistakes and rectify them, you’ll see great improvement in the performance of your site. Keeping an eye on the speed of your website from time to time and applying necessary changes ensures that it becomes an easy experience for visitors to return again and again.
