You may have heard the proverb “slow and steady wins the race,” but when it comes to the functionality of your website, that approach is a surefire way to fail. After just one bad experience, customers (a good 72%) would never consider your brand again. Despite this, the risks are very great.
We’ll explain why site speed is so important to your website in this post. Then, we’ll discuss fixes for 12 frequent problems that can result in subpar website performance. Let’s begin right away!
Why Website Loading Time Is Important
Users expect websites to load quickly these days. The User Experience (UX) of your site suffers when pages take longer than expected to load. This is important because whenever your conversion rate suffers, so does your user experience.
Higher bounce rates and page abandonment are also likely to be observed. More specifically, research indicates that an extra two seconds of loading time can increase the bounce rate of your site by 103%. Additionally, a loading delay of just 100 milliseconds can result in a 7% decrease in conversion rates.
It is crucial to fully optimize the performance of your website because even tiny fractions of a second matter. Additionally, website speed affects not only how long visitors stay on your page and whether they convert, but also whether or not they can find it in the first place.
Both desktop and mobile sites are now ranked by Google based on their site speed. If your website is not performing well, it may become less visible on search engine results pages (SERPs), which will reduce traffic.
Speed is crucial when the success of your website is at stake. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s a good idea to test your site to see where it stands right now. Run load time tests to determine how long your users must wait, and then start making improvements to those figures.
10 Reasons Why Your Site Loading Slowly
1. Unoptimized Images
The most frequent cause of a website’s slowness is typically a large number of poorly optimized images. When loading, high-resolution images can use a lot of bandwidth. Scaling down larger-sized images after uploading them can unnecessarily increase the size of your web page, slowing down the loading of your website. Whatever CMS and website builder you use, this is true.
Another important aspect to take into account is the image format.
JPEG images, for instance, are considerably smaller than images in PNG or GIF formats. Naturally, using JPEG images rather than PNG or GIF will result in a faster loading web page.
Important Notes:
- Check your image file sizes; anything over 1MB is really too large.
- JPEG is preferable to PNG, particularly for larger images. Icons are fine.
- To quickly check image sizes and make corrections, use waterfall tests.
- Images that aren’t optimized can cost you money by using up extra bandwidth.
- Make sure a front-end developer, not a full-stack one, is handling the development of your website. Due to the differences in the development scope, front-end developers are typically more skilled at taming JavaScript on the client side and can solve any JS/jQuery problems.
2. JavaScript Issues
The ability to add dynamic content to websites has been greatly facilitated by the availability of JavaScript/jQuery plugins. JavaScript can, however, severely slow down the page load time of your website if it is used improperly.
JQuery and JavaScript take some time to load, interpret, and run. Therefore, using multiple API calls to render JavaScript/jQuery data can cause a noticeable delay in how quickly web pages load.
Important Notes:
- Real script bloat exists. To determine what you really are, examine your JavaScript scripts.
- Asynchronous loading is a must.
- Think about utilizing a program like Segment or Google Tag Manager. One script to control all of your tools!
3. Avoid Flash Content
Even though Flash is a fantastic tool for incorporating interactivity into your website, it is most likely a factor in your website’s slow page load time. Flash content is typically large in file size, which will affect how quickly your pages load.
Your page loading time would be significantly increased by shrinking or getting rid of your Flash files. You should look for HTML5 replacements for your current Flash content if you want to make your website load faster.
important Notes:
- Flash has poor performance and is highly clumsy.
- lash formerly had a nice vibe. It isn’t right now.
- Look for HTML5 replacements.
4. Abnormally High HTTP Requests
A high number of image, CSS, and JavaScript files can cause excessive HTTP requests. The browser makes multiple requests to load each of these files when a user accesses your website, which can significantly slow down page load time.
Important Notes:
- Reduce HTTP requests by using sprites.
- Wherever you can, lessen the number of files on your pages. includes Javascript, images, and CSS.
- The number of files that users must download is reduced when CSS and Javascript files are minified.
5. Failing to Make Use of Caching Methods
The performance of websites can be greatly enhanced by caching. You are losing out if you are not caching. Using this method, you can store frequently used data points in the so-called “cached memory.”
The same content is served from the cached memory for any subsequent requests, accelerating the entire data retrieval process.
You are likely to notice a significant improvement in your website’s performance after implementing browser/HTTP caching and server-side caching.
Important Notes:
- Performance is dramatically enhanced by caching.
- Many different things, including HTTP, database queries, and images, can be cached.
- Consider caching something if you can. However, proceed cautiously to avoid damaging anything. It may be difficult.
6. Code Issue
Unclean coding is another common reason why websites take so long to load. When you create your website, extraneous white space, inline stylings, blank new lines, and pointless comments can increase the size of the website stylesheet.
By getting rid of these extraneous components, you can compress the code, shrink the file size, and speed up the entire page load time. If you’re monitoring rankings, you’ll probably also notice an improvement in your SEO performance. This procedure is known as minifying technically. There are a number of online tools that can be used to clean and minify your stylesheet files if you are not comfortable with coding. As an alternative, you can enlist the aid of some IT service providers or an experienced SEO firm.
7. Use Gzip Compression
By turning on gZIP compression, you tell the server to send the web objects—such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files—to the requesting browser in a single container.
By minimizing the amount of data transferred between your server and the visitors’ browser, compression decreases response times and makes it possible to serve the requested content much more quickly.
If you haven’t yet made gZIP compression available on your website, you should get started with that right away.
Important Notes:
- An effortless performance gain is gZIP compression.
- All of your web objects (images, CSS, and JS) are bundled together and sent to the requesting browser in this container.
8. Too Many Ads on Your Site
Display ads are unquestionably a great way to monetize popular financial websites and boost your advertising report’s results.
However, the user experience or performance shouldn’t suffer as a result. Don’t let your website’s slowness be caused by too many ads!
The addition of HTTP requests, which would require more processing time, is the most obvious effect of having too many advertisements on your website.
Rich media ads, such as pop-unders, interstitials, and automatic downloads, can generate hundreds of HTTP requests, rendering your website inoperable.
In conclusion, reducing the quantity of display ads will boost your website’s functionality. There might be other inventive options besides just limiting ads, though. For instance, the development team at the gaming website Solitaired tested loading ads based on a timed delay on when users started playing their solitaire game. Page speed increased as a result, and they were able to keep their ad revenue.
Important Notes:
- Due to the additional HTTP requests made by advertisements, page loading times are slowed.
- Use them sparingly; doing so will enhance your ads’ performance, user experience, and click-through rates.
9. Use CDN Services
A CDN service is a distributed network of independent servers set up in various locations that can provide visitors with web content with a high level of availability and performance.
The node at the closest accessible data center will serve the requested content, depending on where in the world your visitor is. The round-trip time (RTT) would be reduced, and the requested content would be delivered much more quickly.
Important Notes:
- Though not required, CDN can be useful. especially if you frequently host visitors from abroad.
- In geographically dispersed datacenters, CDN caches frequently accessed data.
- They can reduce round-trip time (RTT) and deliver content to audiences more quickly.
10. Your Hosting Provider is a Key too!
When it comes to website performance, your web hosting service provider is extremely important. Yes, it’s possible that you’re not solely to blame for your page’s slower-than-average loading speed.
If you have attempted to address each of the aforementioned causes but your website still appears to be responding slowly, changing your hosting company might be the answer to your problem. Pick a hosting company that includes performance optimization services in the hosting cost.
Websites that take a long time to load shouldn’t “be a thing” if your hosting company is competent. Make sure you choose right hosting provider to avoid slow loading times on your site. With HostForLIFE.eu, your website will be hosted on Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), which loads 3X quicker than a standard SSD. As a result, you can immediately experience maximum speed.
Conclusion
The functionality and response time of your website are crucial to its success, so you should take advantage of any chance you get to make improvements. Understanding the cause of your website’s slow load times can improve both its User Experience (UX) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), leading to greater visibility and a higher conversion rate.
In this post, we’ve covered twelve typical reasons why websites load slowly. While it’s ideal to optimize your site in each of the ways we’ve listed, focusing on particular areas for improvement, like enabling caching or compressing your media files, can help you start by addressing the most pressing problems.
Looking for a hosting provider who can meet the performance requirements of your website? Our shared hosting packages are a practical, affordable option that’s perfect for new users and optimized for ASP.NET website. Visit them right away!