Posted 09.03.2023
By Bethany
In 2023, you already know having a fast-loading website is crucial when you’re trying to improve your search engine ranking as well as keeping your visitors happy.
Unfortunately, there’s so many factors that can slow down your website’s performance, causing frustration for visitors, potentially losing your place in the SERPs as well as losing out on conversions. We’re going to take a look at 5 things that could be making your site run at a snail’s pace…
One of the most common things we see contributing to slow website performance is unoptimised images. When you’ve got large images it dramatically increases the time it takes to load the page, especially if your user is on mobile (which 60% of internet users are!)
The good news is that there’s several online tools and plugins available to help you optimise your image sizes. A couple of examples are TinyPNG and Kraken.io that will compress your images without losing any quality.. Win win.
We love a time saver, so if you’re using WordPress, you can use plugins such as WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimiser to automatically compress and optimise your images. Use the spare time to put the kettle on.
Contrary to what it sounds like, it’s not when your code has eaten too much. Bloated code is unnecessary or excessive code that slows down your websites loading time. How does this happen? Usually it’s a theme or plugin that just has too many features!
But Frogspark, how can I fix it? We hear you cry! Start by using a lightweight theme and avoiding hefty plugins that have too many features. If you’re not sure, using an agency with developers that can audit and remove code is probably your best bet. (Shameless plug, it’s something we can do…)
Did you know that the quality of your web hosting provider can also impact your loading time? You do now.
Low quality hosting can mean your website suffers in a number of ways, slow loading time, downtime and other performance issues. Make sure to choose a reliable hosting provider, with lightning fast servers and high uptime guarantee as well as good customer support and security. Also, it’s worth making sure you’re on the right hosting plan for your website’s specific needs. (Again, another shameless plug for our hosting service, sorry but it’s what I get paid for…)
This sounds super complicated, but bear with. HTTP requests refer to the number of requests your website has to make to load everything on a page. This includes images, scripts and stylesheets. In short; the more HTTP requests it makes, the longer it takes to load. Get it?
You’ll want to reduce the number and sizes of images, (remember, we talked about this) as well as the scripts and stylesheets on your site. If you want to be really fancy, you can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to find out what’s causing too many HTTP requests.
To explain this one, I’ll start by telling you what caching is.
Caching is when frequently accessed data such as images or web pages are stored in temporary storage to make it quicker to load them. If your website doesn’t use caching, it needs to load all the elements on the page from scratch, which takes significantly longer.
Think of it as cooking a dinner from scratch vs bunging a ready meal in the microwave.
Read some of our most popular posts on web design, development and increasing trust and conversions here:
So now you know 5 things that are making your loading times an absolute snoozefest, it’s time to go and fix them. But, if you’re thinking maybe it’s a job left to the experts, drop us a line and we’ll get your site running lightning fast in no time.
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