Today’s tech-savvy people browse different websites on a daily basis to perform a number of works, such as online shopping, reading the web-content, downloading E-Products, sending and receiving Emails, etc. To perform all these activities easily and smoothly, websites should load quickly.
If a website is slow, visitors get frustrated sooner. They abandon the website and look for its alternative which loads fast. Always keep in mind that slow websites are not preferred by Google when it has to display results against the entered keywords. So, it’s clear that a slow website gives a slow death to a brand and repel even the most loyal customers away.
Are you frustrated with the slow loading speed of your website? Don’t you have a clue what’s making your website slow? Don’t know how to make your website faster? If yes, then go through the points mentioned below. All these points will let you know the potential factors that make your website slow and their best possible solutions. So, start the voyage.
1. Complicated Website Structure
These days, all entrepreneurs create websites with a business perspective. Their ultimate intention is to reach out the targeted audience, sell their products/services or provide the information searched by the visitors, and generate sufficient revenues every month. So, in order to meet the growing needs of their web-based business, they add too many elements to the websites (such as Good Visual Design, Too many contents, Navigation, Call to Action buttons, responsive design or a separate mobile site, too many advertisements, Staples, Background Video, Large Images, Unique Fonts, several Plugins/extensions, etc.) All these can make your website slow up to a great extent.
Solution:
Try to keep your website design and structure as simple as you can. Add only those elements to your website that are helpful to take your web-based business to a new level.
2. Unoptimized Images
These days, SEO professionals use high-resolution images in bulk while optimizing websites/blogs. It helps visitors understand the text content easily and take the required action if satisfied. Always keep in mind that too many unoptimized images can put pressure on your site’s server and make it slow.
Solution:
If possible, don’t use images which are already available on the web. Take a camera and click awesome pictures yourself. Connect that camera to your computer/laptop and save those images in a separate folder. Now, choose the right image format as per your specific needs, trim the saved images, and upload them to your website with relevant ALT attributes. This will lift your site’s SEO ranking in the SERP of different search engines. On the other hand, optimized images will put less pressure on your site’s server, making it faster than before.
3. Cheap Quality Hosting Server
Maintaining and operating a fully-fledged website is a costly affair. It can make you insolvent if you don’t take steps to diminish the website operational cost. So, most of the website owners choose the shared hosting services to run their sites.
Shared hosting services do come at a low price, but there are many disadvantages associated with them. When you run your website on a shared hosting, resources (bandwidth) is inadequately distributed among all websites hosted on that server. This makes your website very slow. Your website will even go offline if the bandwidth limit is exhausted all of a sudden. Apart from this, your website is exposed to various online security problems. Once your website is hacked by cyber criminals and hackers, your game on the web-based business is almost over. It’s very difficult for a website owner to win back the customer’s trust once his/her reputation is tarnished.
Solution:
Just relinquish the temptation of low-priced hosting services. Don’t worry about the money alone. Just think about your brand’s reputation too. Invest in a good quality hosting service. Analyze the different hosting companies from all possible angles and pick the best one to run your website. It will make your website faster and keep it safe from different types of online security problems.
4. Not Using A CDN
When you create a website and make it live, it can be accessed from all parts of the world. It helps you to get visitors from different geographical locations and create ample business opportunities every day/week/month/year. When your brand becomes very popular, sufficient traffic pours on your website every day. So, there is always an abundance of HTTPS requests to your site’s server. It makes it difficult for visitors to access your website easily and find the required stuff quickly.
Let’s understand it with an example. If your website is hosted in the UK, and somebody is trying to access the site from the USA, the HTTPs request will have to travel a long distance to fetch the matching results and display it to him/her. It takes a significant amount of time, which frustrates the user sitting in the USA and he/she leaves your site immediately.
Solution:
This problem can easily be eliminated by using a CDN. It’s a short form of the Content Distribution Network. It is actually a network of alternative servers distributed in different geographical locations of the world. When a user tries to access your website from a particular location, his/her requested is transferred to the nearest server and the matching results are displayed quickly. It reduces the pressure on the main server of your website and makes it super fast.
5. Avoiding website caching
Every website has its database (stored on the server) to show the requested pages to visitors. If your website is popular among the targeted audience, it gets lots of traffic every day. If you are not using the website caching technique, the abundance of HTTPs requests (generated by visitors) puts more pressure on your site’s server and makes it slow.
Solution:
Implement the website caching without any delay. When users visit your website for the first time, their activities and search habits are stored as static pages. When their request for same pages again, the results are displayed from the saved pages. It reduces pressure from your site’s server and makes it super fast.
6. You Neglect Website Debugging
Every live website, which receives a substantial amount of traffic every day, runs into the need of debugging sooner or later. As a matter of fact, websites store data for all activities that take place on the site. So, after some days/weeks/months, a great pile of unnecessary data is stored on your site’s server. If you don’t clean this, this can put extra pressure on your site’s server and makes it slow.
Solution:
Don’t ignore the huge importance of website debugging. Just erase all unimportant data (stored on your site’s server) from time-to-time to make your site light and fast.
7. Complex Coding
As the demand for fully-fledged, eye-catching, and professional websites are increasing with each passing day, web developers make unnecessary experiments in coding to make sites extraordinary. Always keep in mind the excessive use of complex code make it difficult for websites to parse the HTTPS requests and display the desired results. Difficulty in handling HTTPs requests can make websites slow up to a great extent.
Solution:
Ask web designers and developers to use clean code while creating websites or its pages. It makes your website faster and helps you a lot in its maintenance and hassle-free operation.
Final Words:
Faster websites are the backbone of the web-based business. By using the above-mentioned tips, you can easily make your website faster.