It is a common occurrence for business owners, bloggers, hobby website developers, or anyone else who has a site. Your site’s visitors could be wondering why your site loads very slowly, whether it is their online shop, blog, or social media platform.

What Causes a Website to Load Slowly and How to Fix Them

The speed of your site determines how successful your website will be. It has a central role to play, including the conversion rate and the visibility of your site. Thus, optimizing your website’s speed is vital, although it might need some input to get it done.

Luckily, there are several accessible speed tests applicable. Even though there are several reasons why your site may be slow, you can resolve most of them for free. Unfortunately, slow speed for your website is undoubtedly a recipe for failure.

It is frustrating to both you and the visitors to your site. Slow loading sites account for at least 2.6 billion in losses of lost revenue each year. Thus, we look at some of the most common reasons why your site runs slowly and possible solutions you apply to start noticing a difference in your business.

Using unoptimized images on your website

If you have large file sizes with no tags, no description, or names, such images are considered unoptimized, and they may slow your website.

Images resulting from programs such as Photoshop are known to be large files. Even though they may be quality images, they can slow your website since they carry many details.

Besides, Goggle can’t see images. Thus, they usually read alternate tags only, which gives you room to add a small description of the image, but without the description, Google will not know what your images are.

How to solve it

You will need to optimize the images on your website hence turning your website into a fast one. While optimizing the images, you should start by compressing them first.

If you resize images, you should keep the ratio intact. Thus, if you resize the height, you will also need to resize the width; otherwise, you will be distorting the image quality.

Look for a photo editing platform that will allow you to stick to the correct ratio. It will be essential to change the size of the actual images instead of stating the size of the image on the website’s code since that will not optimize your images.

It is advisable to resize the photo before you insert the code. Besides, the file type is also vital in resizing the size of the image.

For instance, PNGs are applicable when using images that require some transparency or in instances where you need a very detailed image. But you should know that PNGs are larger files that take more time to load.

Since you want a standard file type that will load quickly, you should go for JPGs since they load quickly due to their smaller file sizes. Thus, the site will load faster for your visitors, particularly on mobile devices.

Too much flash content

Flash is a great tool that adds interactivity to your website, but it could also slow your website. Flash content consists of bulky files that are big hence making the pages load slowly.

Thus, reducing the size of the flash files or doing away with them will ultimately significantly improve your site’s speed. Also, you can look for HTML5 alternatives and use them to replace the existing flash content.

How to solve it

Find HTML5 replacements and reduce the size of the HTML files or eliminate them.

High traffic on the website

High traffic is another reason why websites get slow. Although information moves at a very high speed, it can only accommodate a given number of users before slowing down. The bandwidth of the website determines the number of visitors it can handle at a given time.

Bandwidth is how much technical information an internet connection can handle at a given time. A large bandwidth will handle more information, and thus it can handle more visitors.

The same case applies to the Mbps, which refers to megabits per second. It helps you to know how much information is transferred through your internet connection per second.

How to fix it

High traffic is necessary, and you should welcome it. But you will need to find a solution to keep your site loading faster by increasing your bandwidth.

That is achievable by contacting whoever is hosting your site and getting a better plan which will come with some increments.

Too many ads on your site

Ads will take a significant part on your site, just like videos and images, and can result in slow websites. If you are allowing third parties to advertise your website, they can cause your website to be slow.

The ads will increase the amount of time it takes to load the website and keep annoying the visitors to your site. The visitors on your site might bounce because of ads or the load time.

How to fix It

In case the visitors on your site are bouncing from your site due to too much load time, then decreasing the load time would be advisable; otherwise, you might end up losing valuable customers who would be worth more than the adverts.

Besides, if ads are your primary revenue source, you could be losing money if you have so many on your site. If the site takes too long to load, the visitors might find that they were waiting for ads instead of the content, and they bounce off annoyed.

Thus, it would be best to reduce the number of ads to at most two on your site. That will not slow your site much, and it will help to sustain your visitors.

A large number of social sharing buttons

It would be best to allow you and users to share information on social media fast, but it can also slow the load time if you have so many sharing buttons.

For these buttons to work, you will need to add them to your site plugins. You will also need to retrieve data from the respective social media site where they are used.

Thus, you will need to note that having a button for every social platform can lead to a slow pace for your site.

How to fix it

If you know your content does not get any share, you should do away with the share buttons. You should also reduce the number of share buttons on the page. It would be best if you only focus on high-value sites such as Facebook and Twitter without overloading your site.

It will also help to save your page from loading data from sites.

Lack of content delivery network (CDN)

Failure to use a content delivery network might be the cause of your slow website. Content delivery networks have several servers placed in various geographical places to serve your website users. The user will connect much faster to your website if you are using CDN with your website server. The content delivery network reduces the distance between the website server and the user.

The site loads very fast since the distance between the user and the website server is concise. A content delivery network speeds the communication between your browser and website server; without it, you might have to wait a bit longer to open your browser.

How to fix it

To fix a slow website, implement a content delivery network. You will have to engage a company offering professional content delivery network services for your website to be more accessible. The load time will be short, and you will have your website running in no time.

Having too many elements on a page

The videos, images, scripts, and various elements you have determine your page’s size. If you have more elements on a page, then it will load very slowly. When all pages load like snails, your website will be relatively slow.

How to fix it

To fix this problem, reduce the quantity and size of elements per page; this will reduce your website’s load. Maximize fewer images, videos, and other elements to achieve the desired effects. Consider performing a heat map test on your website to know what users are clicking and viewing.

The heat map test will help you know whether you have excess content on your website. Go ahead and delete videos, images, and other elements that have no views.

Inefficient web hosting

You need a hosting service for you to display your website online. Web host gives you space to create your website. As a result, it operates your website from its server. If a user enters your website in a browser, the web host uses its server and serves the user of your website.

Web hosting services have different costs, a cheap hosting service will load very slowly, and you may lose your customers.

How to fix it 

Paying for a reliable web host will cost you more to acquire good hosting services, but you will enjoy peace of mind knowing that your website is easily accessible and loading time is reduced to seconds. Keep in mind that poor hosting services and a slow website can make you lose valuable customers. To avoid losing customers, always invest more in a hosting service that guarantees your users a fast load time.

Besides, you can acquire VPS windows since it is an inexpensive package, but it allows you to create and run complex websites. You can also store huge chunks of data and also stream it to a number of adaptable services. It is suitable for your company if you are not sure how much traffic you will experience.

Failure to make use of caching techniques

Caching is a technique that enables you to store data used frequently in cached memory. To improve the functioning and efficiency of your website, engage in the caching process. Without caching, you must be missing out.

The data at cached memory is easily retrieved as requests of this data are received directly to the point. Your website performance will drastically improve if you implement server and browser caching.

How to fix it

Caching is a bit tricky but can always be done carefully without altering something else. You can also engage an expert to do caching for you.

Limited time

Various factors make your website load slowly. You require to take a lot of steps to make sure your website loads fast. It means a lot of time is required, while you may be engaged elsewhere. Being a business person, you may not have enough time to optimize your website. Hire an expert to clean the mess for you and have your fast-loading website.

How to fix it

Hire a professional is the easiest solution to having a fast-loading website. Experts always have knowledge, time, and resources to ensure your website is easily accessible. They also offer you advice on what you should do to have your website optimized.

Unclean code

Unclean coding is another cause of website slowness if your website has inline styling, large white spaces, empty new line, and irrelevant comments, the style sheet becomes more extensive in size, making your website load slowly.

How to fix it

Reduce the file size and compress the code to improve your website loading time; this process is called Minifying. If you don’t have enough knowledge in minifying, engage various online tools to clean and minify your stylesheet files. You can also consult IT experts.

Conclusion

Various factors affect the website loading speed. These factors include high traffic, too much flash content, numerous ads, bulky codes, and unoptimized images. It is challenging to determine what is the leading cause of a slow website.

You should put every effort into knowing the root cause of the problem and solve it, matter how hard it might seem. The fast-loading speed will attract customers and increase your monthly earnings. You can also look for an efficient support team to help you increase your website loading speed and solve your problem permanently.