When it comes to any website online, loading speed is really important for both user experience and rankings in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
What Is Considered A Slow Website Loading Time?
When clicking on a website link, most users don’t want to wait more than 3 seconds to be brought to your website page.
This works out to be a huge problem, because if your website takes 4 seconds or longer to load, any potential traffic you would have had from people, you will lose, when they bounce out and go to a quicker website.
This looses you a lot of traffic, but also search engine rankings, resulting in a huge setback to the success of your online business model.
That’s why its so important to firstly have a reliable hosting provider, and also understand how to fix any other issues that are slowing down your website.
These May Be Reasons Why You Are Expieriencing Slow Loading Web Pages
1. Unoptimized Images – High resolution Images can consume a lot of bandwidth while loading. Try to aim for an Image of 1MB or less. Use JPEG instead of PNG. You can also use a plugin with WordPress to optimize your images automatically.
2. JavaScript Code Problems – There may be plugins that you installed that use up a lot of resources, and slow everything down. Make sure that you use a popular theme with lots of great reviews on it, as these themes will load extremely fast, and they are also updated often to ensure the best user experience.
3. Too Much Flash Content – Flash content used to be great in the past but not anymore. Its better not to use flash content anymore as there are a major drawbacks like, you need a flash player, there are security issues associated with it, doesn’t work on Apple mobile devices, and its inefficient. Rather, use the new standard HTML 5, as its supported on all browsers, its more efficient, and works on all devices.
4. Not Utilizing Caching on your sites – Caching is a technology that helps improve the speed of your website, and also helps with decreasing the chance of the server that you are hosting your site from being overloaded. When someone visits your site with their web browser, this is when caching will temporarily store copies of HTML web documents and images from pages that have recently been visited. What this does is that it helps reduce bandwidth usage and server lag. Installing a good Cache Plugin to your wordpress site should help with a slow website due to caching issues.
5. Too many HTTP requests – To access a resource on a server, an HTTP request is made by a client to a named host, which is located on the server. To make the request this uses a unique URL, with information that is needed to access the resource. When you have too many HTTP requests made by a web page, this can slow down a page’s load time, ultimately damaging the user experience. To help with this problem, reduce the number of files on your web pages, including CSS, Images, and JavaScript. This way when a user visits your site their browser doesn’t have to perform more requests to load all these files than it has to.
6. Not Using gZIP Compression – What gZIP compression does, is work with a server and a browser to easily compress and decompress files as its transmitted over the internet. Its used with images, CSS and JavaScript files, putting them in a single container before they are sent over from your server to a browser that is requesting these files. That’s important because the compression lowers the response time by reducing the size of the data being transfired between your server and the visitors’ browser. Therefore, your content will load much faster for them. This will have a very positive effect on your users experience.
7. Too Many Ads Will Slow Down Load Times – This can slow your website quite a lot because it puts extra pressure by putting more load on your server by additional HTTP requests.
8. Not Using a CDN – Using CDN(Content Delivery Network) is not compulsory for the speed of your site, but it may help. That’s a network of servers that are placed in different locations around the world, that distributes content from the original server that your site is hosted on. It distributes your content throughout the world by caching content close to where each end user is accessing the internet with a web enabled device. This usually makes the end users experience much faster than if you didn’t have this in place.
Conclusion
Slow loading website pages are not only are frustrating for the end user, but will hurt your Search Engine rankings in Google, and anyone one who does find your site will most probably bounce off it, if it doesn’t load in time.
The sooner that you can fix this issue the better, and the above tips should help.
If you are interested to see where I’m hosting my website, on lightning fast servers, and where I’m also learning so much about the online marketing space, please check this review out.
I’ve been very happy with the speeds and hosting here.
Please let me know if you have any other question.
Luciano
Adventurouswealth.com