In the age of record low attention spans, slow webpage loading times are one of the biggest pet peeves for most people. As a website owner, slow loading times will not only turn a lot of people away but may also affect your search engine rankings. If you’re in business, your bottom line will definitely be hurt.
In this article, we will highlight the common causes of slow load times and what you can do to improve your website’s loading speed.
How Do You Know If Your Pages Are Loading Too Slowly?
While different people will have their opinions on what qualifies as “slow” when it comes to website load times, many web developers agree that any site that takes more than 3 seconds to load a page is slow.
Notably, the only sure way to accurately tell your website’s load speed is by doing a speed test. You can do this using Google’s own PageSpeed API or any of the commercial tools like GTmetrix.
What Slows Down a Website’s Loading Time
Your website’s loading speed may be affected by various factors, including:
Bad Plugins
The first thing to check when you notice that your site is loading too slowly is your plugins list. Some plugins may have been poorly coded and thus malfunction after some time. Other plugins may also be running on outdated software, which is both a performance and security concern. Additionally, having too many plugins installed on your site adds to its size and can slow it down.
Oversized Pages
It goes without saying that the bigger your pages are, the longer they take to load. Since you can’t possibly reduce the size of the text content, you need to optimize all the images you post and make them as small (in size) as possible. Fortunately, you don’t need to hire a website design agency to do it for you. Just use Photoshop or any image editing tool available to you.
Too Many HTTP Requests
Too many image files, ads, and Javascript scripts can overload the browser since each file is an HTTP request on its own and the more they are, the longer they take to load. So, you may want to include as few Javascript, CSS, and image files as you can on every page.
What Can You Do to Make Your Site Load Faster?
Fortunately, you can significantly improve your site’s performance by making some minor tweaks to its structure. Some of the most effective ways to make your web pages load faster include:
Getting a Good Hosting Provider
The most basic, yet crucial pillar of a high-performance website is its hosting service. While it’s advisable to get a hosting provider within your budget, it is equally important to know that the cheapest providers are almost always defective. Free hosting should also be out of the question if you run a business site.
Ideally, go for a provider who offers you the following services:
- 24/7 premium support
- Guaranteed malware protection and removal
- Built-in caching feature
- Free SSL encryption
- Daily automated backups
Consider Using a Premium Content Caching Tool
Caching tools typically reduce the time it takes to retrieve images and other content from their original storage and into the user’s browser. This significantly reduces the amount of time it takes to fully load a page by several seconds. Again, the best caching tools are not free but are certainly cheaper than the page views (and thus revenue) that slow loading would potentially occasion.
Subscribe To a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is basically a globally distributed network of servers designed to shorten the physical distance between web users and the servers they want to connect to. This, in turn, means that site visitors get high-quality content from websites in the CDN within very short timeframes irrespective of their locations.
Some web hosting agencies offer in-built CDN integration but if yours doesn’t, consider looking at the popular options available such as Cloudflare, Google Cloud CDN, StackPath. It may cost you a few extra bucks per month, but it is absolutely worth it.
