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7 Reasons Your Website is Slow

You work hard to create a website that brings real value to visitors and potentially results in a reasonable income. However, finding out that your website has low traffic because of slow load times can be awfully frustrating. Thankfully, there are things that you can do to address this concern.

7 Reasons Your Website is Slow

response of the website

1. Too Many JavaScript Files

JavaScript is necessary to make your website attractive and functional. However, it can also slow down your site.

Every time a web page loads, JavaScript files have to be loaded first. This can dramatically slow down your site. So while you need some JavaScript, make sure that only the essential JavaScript files are required to load a page. When possible, use inline JavaScript instead of files.

2. Your Site Isn’t Utilizing Sufficient Servers

A fast web hosting service utilizes multiple servers in strategic locations to enable your website to load more rapidly. If your site only uses one or two servers in a single geographic location, visitors from other areas of the world may find that your site loads slowly.

If your site isn’t loading well for everyone everywhere, it may be time to switch your hosting service. A good hosting service can offer you a variety of servers to speed up your site at a very reasonable cost.

3. Your Media Files are Too Large

Media files are essential to provide a good user experience. Visitors to your site are unlikely to stay long if there aren’t any pictures or videos. However, having large files can increase your loading time.

It’s best to compress images so that they will load more quickly. There are services you can use to compress images before you upload them.

Host videos on YouTube or another platform and then embed them so that they’ll load more quickly as well. Having a separate YouTube channel can also be helpful for SEO, giving you another reason to host videos on YouTube instead of directly on your site.

4. You Have Too Much Code

Needless to say, code is essential to run your website. However, whether you write code yourself or use a content management system to handle coding for you, excessive code can be a problem when it comes to your site speed.

Code can have unnecessary breaks and characters that aren’t necessary to run your page but can negatively impact loading speed. A couple of plugins can help to minify the code and speed up load times.

5. Plugins May be Hurting Your Site’s Performance

Bulky plugins or too many plugins can take a long time to load, resulting in a slow site. While some plugins are necessary or dramatically add to user experience, others are unimportant or may not be doing anything at all. Check the plugins on your site to determine whether they are important for running the page or if they can be removed.

6. Excessive Traffic

You probably want as much traffic to your website as possible. After all, isn’t that why you created a website in the first place? However, your website can slow down if you have more traffic than your host can handle.

Your web server can only serve so many people at once. If you find that you frequently have a slow down due to traffic, it may be time to get a better host that can handle more traffic

7. Too Many Text Graphics

Text graphics can be a fun and attractive way to display text on your website. However, there can be some notable downsides to using graphics to display text on your site.

For one thing, large image files used to display text can slow down your pages. This is particularly so if you have text graphics appear on every page, for instance, as part of the header or footer of the page.

It is also worth noting that any text used in images will not help your SEO since Google won’t see it.

Why Having a Fast Website Matters

  • User experience. Visitors to your website may be less likely to be satisfied and keep using the site if pages load slowly.
  • Abandonment and bounce rates. Visitors have a brief attention span when it comes to how long it takes your website to load. They may leave the site when there are slow load times.
  • SEO. How quickly your site loads is one of the things, Google uses to determine whether your site should be suggested in search results. A site that loads slowly will suffer a hit to its SEO.

Speed Up Your Website

Every millisecond matters when it comes to your website’s load time. There are several reasons why your site may be loading slowly, but thankfully, most of them have a relatively simple fix.

If you have found that your website is loading slowly, it is well worth the effort to speed it up. While this isn’t the best part of creating or managing a website, all of your hard work in website creation and design could be wasted if your pages load too slowly. For this reason, speeding up your site is a priority well worth the extra time and effort.

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