What is Slowing Down Your Website?
A slow website can be very frustrating for visitors. If your site takes a long time to load, it will cause people to leave your site, hurt your search engine rankings, and more. Learning how to speed up your website is very important. First, to be clear, when someone is experiencing problems with slow load times on a website, it is usually going to be an issue on the side of the visitor to the site. The following are a quick recap of problems that users can have that may cause slow response times:
Their Internet Connection is Overburdened with Video Streaming & Other Issues
The Visitor’s PC is Infected with a Virus or Malware
The Internet Service they Purchased is Slow
The Router/Modem is Misconfigured
The Visitor’s Computer is Outdated
The Browser that the Visitor is Using has Poorly Developed Plugins
If you have had a user notify you that your website isn’t loading fast enough, this should be the first place to check. To confirm this, ask the users if they are having slow response times with other similar websites. If they are, it is almost certain that the problem is on their end. If not, you will need to start looking for issues on your website that could cause it to run slowly. This page identifies some of the most common website side problems that can cause slow response times, and how to speed things up.
Inefficient Coding
If your site is not properly coded, it isn’t going to load up very quickly. Fortunately, most people today don’t develop their own site from scratch. Instead, they use existing content management systems such as WordPress. Even if you are using one of these popular options, however, you also have to think about the various themes and plugins that you are using.
In situations where you have found that your site suddenly started running slower than normal, reviewing any changes you have made to your site recently is a great place to start. If you recently added a new plugin to your site, for example, consider disabling it and testing it again. In many cases, this will be the answer to how to speed up your website’s load times.
Lots of Advertising on One Page
Another common reason why a site loads slowly is because of the advertisements that are present on the page. Adding advertisements to your site is a great way to make money, but you have to be careful with how this is done. When it comes to ads, make sure to consider the following:
Total Number of Ads – Each advertisement has to load, which can really slow down how long it takes for your site to display for the users.
Using Multiple Ad Providers – If you display ads from multiple providers, you are at risk of slowing down the site. Each ad will load from its own provider, so the more of them there are, the bigger the risk that one of them will have a slow response time.
Type of Ads – Many ads are very slow to load because they use animations, videos, flash, and other things that can bog down any browser.
Excessive Use of Images or Videos
Websites that have a lot of images and videos will take longer to load because of the increased amount of data that needs to be transferred. In the past this used to be a much more significant issue because most people didn’t have high-speed internet connections. Even today, however, with the widespread use of high-speed internet, too many videos and images can slow things down.
If you have a page that needs lots of these features, consider how they will appear on your site. For example, you may be able to split the content onto two separate pages so they don’t all load at once. Another option is to only have half the page load initially, then the rest of it loads as the visitor scrolls down. There are quite a few ways to speed up your website while still having all the features you desire.
Issues with Your Hosting
Your hosting provider is another important thing to consider when trying to find ways to speed up your website. Some web hosting companies, for example, will oversell their shared hosting servers. This means that while your site may have loaded fine at first, it will keep getting slower as more and more sites are added to the server you are on.
Here at Verpex, we never oversell a server and are constantly monitoring hosting performance to prevent slowdowns. We also offer solid-state drives to all our customers. Solid-state drives are significantly faster than older hard drive options, which can directly impact how long it takes for a page to load. Every aspect of our hosting services are designed to ensure you are able to get the best and fastest experience for your visitors.
