By Daxon Mako
It’s pretty simple to check whether or not your site is fast. Just run it through Google PageSpeed Insights, and it’ll give you a grade based on how optimized your page is for speed.
If you don’t get a good score, there are some factors that can slow down your page speed. Some of these hiccups are easily fixable, and some of them require more work.
Discover the most common causes and how to solve them.
Factors that Slow Down Your Website
1. Poor coding.
A website with substandard coding may load very slowly or not at all. Pages that take forever to load can be a big deal-breaker for users — and even if a page eventually does appear, the user may have already given up. If you’re working on your own site, make sure it’s coded correctly. If you use a web designer, ask them about it as well.
2. Ads.
Ads on a page can often slow down websites considerably, especially if they’re animated and sound comes with them (which many do). In addition, they tend to occupy space that would otherwise be used by content.
To verify this is the case with your site, use your site’s own servers to view the page without an Internet connection (either turn off Wi-Fi or disconnect from the computer altogether) and see how it loads. If it still loads slowly when there’s no Internet connection available, ads are likely the culprit.
3. Bad hosting.
Badly hosted websites are slow for two main reasons: The server may be overloaded and unable to handle requests quickly enough, or it may have insufficient bandwidth (a measure of how much data can move through a server at any one instance).
4. Unoptimized image sizes and quality.
This is the biggest offender when it comes to slow websites. Images are responsible for about 60% of the load time on most sites, so make sure that your images are optimized properly.
Make their file size as small as possible. Try not to use huge, high-quality images on every page; it’s OK to use smaller ones if they’re not crucial to the content on a given page. Using online tools to compress your images is an easy way to get started making quick improvements.
5. Flash content.
Flash was once very popular for creating dynamic, interactive websites, but it has fallen out of favour in recent years because it tends to be slower than HTML-based alternatives — which means your website will be slower if you have too much Flash content on it.
Check your site’s pages with flash detection software and see where you might be able to cut back on Flash without losing anything important.
Author Bio
Michael Hollis is a Detroit native who has helped hundreds of business owners with their business loan solutions. He’s experimented with various occupations: computer programming, dog-training, accounting… But his favourite is the one he’s now doing — providing business funding for hard-working business owners across the country.
