As website users, we all know how frustrating it is to land on a website that takes too long to load. It reminds us of the days of dial-up internet, and all of the hours we wasted waiting for web pages to load line by line.
As a website owner, slow load times are more than frustrating…they’re detrimental to your business. Beyond being irritating for your visitors (turning them away and obliterating customer retention) slow load times negatively impact your website’s SEO visibility. Search engines will recognize your website’s lack of speed and punish you for it in the rankings.
Luckily, it’s usually fairly simple to identify and fix your website speed issues. Here are 5 of the most common problems that cause slow page load times and how to fix them almost immediately.
Problem 1: Large media files are taking too long to load
Imagery and videos are important aspects of modern marketing, so of course you want to use plenty of them on your website. However, these large media files are often the main culprit in slow page load times. You can use free tools like Pingdom.net to identify any media files that are negatively affecting your website’s load times, re-optimize them by resizing or compressing them, and then re-uploading them to your site.
Tip: Try to keep your most prominent banner images under 1mb in size, and smaller supporting images under 300kb for optimal load times. Video resizing is a bit more complicated, so check out this article by Elegant Themes for instructions.
Problem 2: Your website’s code is too dense
The amount of code on your website might be a factor in your slow load times. The more lines of code a web browser is required to parse, the longer it will take to show the end product to your visitors. If you don’t have the resources or time to manually adjust your code, tools like Minifier (code copy and paste web application) and AutoOptimize (WordPress plugin) are available to help reduce the load of your website’s heavy code.
Problem 3: You’re not taking advantage of browser caching
Browsers, by default, cache information stored on your website so that when a visitor comes back, it doesn’t have to load every element on your site again. If you expect return visitors, make sure your website is caching as many elements as possible to help improve your page load speeds. Hosting providers and content management systems typically offer caching options, so see what options are available to you and take advantage of them.
Problem 4: Your server response time is lagging
Your server response time can be slowed down by a variety of factors such as:
- The amount of visitors your website receives
- Plugins or other software used on your website
- Your web server configuration
- Your hosting provider or current plan
Pingdom.net comes in clutch again here. You can use their website speed analyzer to help you identify bottlenecks in your server response time, so you know which areas are slowing down your page load times and gain insight into how to fix them.
Problem 5: You’re using an outdated, or underperforming content management system (CMS)
As the entire platform your website is built on, your Content Management System (WordPress, Joomla, Shopify, Squarespace, etc…) is a centerpiece of your website’s performance. These systems require regular updating to keep up with the ever-changing web standards and tools. If you have been ignoring that “Update Required” messages from your CMS, this could be affecting your website speed. Remember, not all content management systems are created equally, so if your website has outgrown your underperforming CMS, it might be time for an upgrade.
If you need help implementing these load time changes to your website, get in touch!
