Slow Website? Here’s How To Fix It
No matter how advanced and good-looking your website is, if it’s slow, more than half of your potential visitors will never get to see it. It’s widely known that people have no patience, and when asked to wait for more than three seconds, they usually leave. That is why a slow website is a massive problem for you.
Why a slow website is a problem
We’ve already mentioned the inpatient customers, but the thing is, if your site is slow, people probably won’t even see it anyways because Google hates slow-loading pages. As a rule, it never recommends sluggish websites to people, which is a disaster for SEO.
Your images are too heavy
We’ve already discussed the importance of optimizing images, and for a good reason, since even one image can ruin your site’s performance. Video can also be a culprit, but usually, it’s images that cause all the problems.
So what can you do about the images? Take a look at their format and make sure it’s the most optimized one — in 2022, WebP is considered the best for lossless and lossy compression, as we advise you to convert all your images from jpeg (or, god forbid, png) to WebP. Next, ensure the images are compressed and don’t take too much space.
Your hosting service is no good
No matter how optimized your site is, a bad hosting service will bring it down all the same. That is why you have to take notice of your potential provider’s reputation and whether it’s a good fit for your type of website. For smaller pages, Bluehost is enough, but bigger projects require more expensive and premium services.
You don’t use CDN
CDN — or a content delivery network — is a smart way of making your website fast worldwide. It matters primarily if you target more than one country. If you only need an audience from the US, it’s okay to do with only one server, but if you want your services to attract attention all over the globe, you need a network of servers like CDN. What it does is it stores a copy of your website on servers in every region so that the users can access it fast no matter where they are. Fastly and Cloudflare are among the most popular CDNs, but there are others.
CSS and JavaScript overload
Modern websites are expected to be interactive, and for that, you have to use all that CSS and JavaScript have to offer. But the fancier your site is, the heavier it gets. That is why you should monitor your files and optimize them. If possible, replace external JavaScript with inline, but don’t overdo it!
Plugins
We’ve already covered plugins, but they can be both a good and a bad thing for your website. Some plugins really do improve the UX, but try to use them in moderation. Excessive use of plugins is almost always bad for your site.
Always use only those plugins that are absolutely indispensable. And if you are intent on using heavy plugins, your hosting provider should be up to the challenge. Also, if you’re using WordPress, use Query Monitor to see what process takes up the most time.