When your website was first launched every aspect of it was tested and all seemed to be fine. It was flawless, responsive and loaded fast on browsers. In recent times you’ve started experiencing slower load time for your website than normal and you are wondering what is the cause and if its a serious issue.

Indeed yes, its a serious issue. You might have heard that age-old saying that “slow and steady wins the race”, but when it comes to the performance of your website, that certainly is a recipe for failure. If your website is slow it will affect the user experience for your customers and consequently negatively impact your online sales or website’s conversion rate.

But what really happened? Assuming your website was previously a shooting star on all browsers how did it get slow over time. Here are our Top 5 possible Reasons why your website is running slower than normal:

1. Unoptimized Images

The use of a large volume of unoptimized images is usually the most common reason behind website slowness. Images with high-resolution can use up lots of bandwidth while loading. Uploading larger sized images and then scaling them down can unnecessarily increase the size of your web page – thus causing your website to load slowly.

The format of your images is another important factor to consider.

For example, JPEG images are smaller in size and lighter than other image formats like PNG or GIF. Your web page will load faster if you are using images in JPEG format instead of PNG or GIF format.

1. 2 Bad Hosting

Your website hosting provider and the hosting plan you subscribed to plays a vital role when it comes to website
performance. Sometimes your slower-than-average page load speed may not be entirely your own fault.

For example if your website has high traffic and its hosted on a shared server, there is a good possibility of your website being slow or crash as the traffic increases. In such a situation getting a dedicated hosting server or switching to a hosting provider a hosting provider that offer performance optimisation services bundled in the price of the hosting may just solve your problem.

1. 3 Poor Code

Another common cause for website slowness is poor coding. The presence of excessive white spaces, inline stylings, empty new lines and unnecessary comments in your website’s scripts can make them grow larger in size leading to increase in load time of your website on browsers. By removing these unnecessary elements from your scripts, you can compress the code, reduce the file size and improve the overall page load time and if you’re tracking rankings you’ll probably see a boost in your SEO performance too. In technical terms, this process is known as minifying.

1. 4 Caching

Caching is known to improve the load time of websites by leaps and bounds. If your website is not use caching techniques, then you are missing out. It’s a technique that let’s you store frequently used data points in the ‘cached memory’.

Any subsequent requests for the same content gets served from the cached memory, thus speeding up the whole data retrieval process. By implementing browser/HTTP caching and server-side caching, you are likely to experience a huge improvement in the performance of your website.

1. 5 Javascript Issues

Javascript plugins or libraries are useful in adding dynamic content to websites. However if implemented incorrectly, it can cripple your website’s page load speed.

It takes time for jQuery & JavaScript to be loaded, interpreted and executed. So if you are using many API calls to render JavaScript/jQuery data, it can result in significant delay when loading the web pages.

Conclusion

Website page load speed depends on a variety of factors such as unoptimized images, Javascript issues , bad coding practices, and inappropiate hosting to name a few.

It can be a difficult task to figure out what exactly is causing the website to slow down. No matter what the root cause might be, you should leave no stones unturned to get to the bottom of the issue.

At WordPress Design Fix, our support team will help you get rid of slow loading websites for good. We will find and fix all the issues that makes your website slow. If your website is slower than normal, its a serious issue. Contact us and let us help you fix it.