No one can stand a slow website. Not me or any of the 90% of other internet users with attention spans shorter than that of a goldfish who are more likely to bounce if your website pages don’t load up within the first five (5) seconds. (Google)
Slow website loading speed decreases your chances of generating leads and making sales from your share of web traffic. In this post, we’ll uncover five of the common culprits responsible for the reasons why your website loads at a snail pace. We’ll also shed the light on how you can turn up the speed so it loads as fast as possible.
1. Low-quality hosting
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The problem with hosting is that it can doom your website to perpetually slow loading times even before you have an actual website.
So, before writing the first line of code, you want to make sure your website is hosted on a high-quality hosting service provider. Doing this will help you avoid slow loading, low SEO ranking chances, and the poor user experience that comes with browsing on slow websites.
2. Heavy and unclean codes
Are the source codes on your website absurdly heavy, messy, or unclear? All of these can significantly impact how fast your website loads. So, you know your website deserves better than some poorly written codes.
Any web design or development expert worth their weight will appreciate the importance of having clean and user-focused codes on a website’s speed and performance.
3. Not using good caching techniques
Caching techniques help make content readily and easily available to read for users.
The key basis of this involves storing the data on the computer that needs to read the information rather than having to read such information directly from the original source. Caching, when done right, will significantly help boost your website speed.
4. Unoptimized images and media content
Unoptimized media content can take a toll on your website speed, especially if you own an image-heavy website.
While it makes sense to complement your written content with enough images, audio, video, etc, not properly optimizing these media files as far as sizes are concerned can slow down your website loading speed.
5. Not using a content delivery network (CDN)
CDN helps cache content in multiple locations around the world.
By storing these caches closer to website users, the time it takes to render on their device is significantly cut short. While having this set up can help supercharge your website speed, not having one in place can mean slow loading times.
6. Too many plugins
Plugins help improve the functionality of websites.
But like every good thing, too much of it can impact your website speed. Along with slow website loading speeds, having too many plugins installed on your website can put your website at risk of website crashes, and security breaches, among others. So, it’s always better to stick to the few you really need.
7. Code bloated WordPress themes
One of the best things about WordPress is how easy it can be set up. There are thousands of both free and paid themes that you can consider when building your website. The problem with some of these themes, however, is that they might be poorly built. WordPress themes with bloated codes can mean slow-loading pages and poor user experience for your users, among other things.
Conclusion
There are a million and one reasons why you need to take your website loading speed more seriously. Aside from the obvious poor user experience on your website that could significantly impact your website’s lead generation and sales conversion chances, website speed is also a key SEO ranking factor that could impact your website’s visibility on search engines.
From choosing the right hosting provider to ensuring clean and clear codes, among other things, getting your website to load as fast as possible (great if it loads under 3 seconds!) can help make a world of difference on how well your website can support your business’s strategic digital goals.