Do you know how many of your visitors have closed your websites by the time it is loading?
Well, there are many. Almost all the startup websites and even amateur does some of these mistakes that are very common and usual in every third website on the Internet.
Optimizing your website for loading time is always a win-win procedure to keep your visitors happy and not making waiting.
Moreover, do you know that the waiting of an average person for loading a page is down 7 seconds from 13? And, reports say that around 40% of the users hit the close button on the very third second if a website doesn’t load.
You must get a benchmark loading speed for your website. Start optimizing the loading time of your website with these below points as soon as possible!
1. Your web hosting is (really) Bad!
Web hosting the one of the most important segment in optimizing your website loading. It is important to get how quickly your server responds to requests coming. If your hosting is slow, apparently your site will load slow.
Web hosting is the base of any website and it has to strong and as quick as flash!
So, the resolution is that you get a great web hosting like SiteGround. Giants like GoDaddy and Dreamhost are going just on average with web hosting. As per experience GoDaddy has been by far the slowest web hosting.
2. You haven’t updated the available updates of plugins
Some of the plugins that you have installed in your WordPress websites often gets the update. But, we know that you are lazy to update every now and then. Well, sad part is, this quite affects your website loading speed.
There has to be reason behind WordPress pushing out the notification about the available updates for your plugins as well as themes. Solution is, keep all the stuff in your panel updated for the sake of your websites’ performance.
3. You have installed a heavy theme
Your website is everything. If you want to optimize your website, always ask yourself questions like ‘Do I really need to these much of images in slider?’ ‘Do I have to make these pages so lengthy?’ And get straight with yourself.
Solution is, Try minimizing your stuff per page. Keep everything short and sweet. Keep it cliché and simple and don’t try to put everything all together on your website.
Google PageSpeed Insights tool will give you a complete picture of your website’s performance. It analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster.
4. You have not installed caching facility
Caching offers a browser to store the data of your website on the first visit. So, next time if they are visiting, your website will pop up quickly instead of fetching all the data again all the way from server.
Most cache plugins available do a great job at achieving a couple of performance aims. W3 Total Cache is better than other caching solutions.
5. Too many (unnecessary) plugins running at once
There are thousands of amazing plugins out there that does cool things for your website and makes everything easy. Soon, you would have got the plugins to control very functionality and feature of your site.
High chances are that you would have plugins to manage plugins too. But, this all can badly affect the speed of your website.
Everytime someone enters your website URL, it requests each and every facet of your website from your server that includes images, content and plugins.
Hence, all plugins are somewhat heavy and it takes a while to request and load each one of them.
Solution is, unclutter your admin panel and evaluate which plugin is useful and which is not.
In fact, you can check the performance of plugin with the help of …..another plugin (I am sorry) P3 (Plugin Profiler Plugin) to check how each plugin is impacting while site is loading, and then you can easily manage it.
6. More than enough widgets
Widget area that is full of Javascript based widgets can make your website a slower than a snail. Mostly sidebars are dozed by social media feeds that can slow down your website, notably.
Solution is, simply do the cleaning of your widget area. Try to keep one social media feed and remove all the unessential things that seems slowing down your website.
7. Your image size are big and not optimize
Another thing that increases a lot of time to load your website other than plugins is Images. Large image having big file size take longer to load.
Solution is, you can start compressing your images that you are going to upload on your website.
Also, you can define the file format like JPEG or PNG, no other format than these two. Compressing your image will help website a lot, and you will watch the difference in loading on your own.
Save your JPEG images somewhere around the 80% quality range.
This would mean about a 20% compression. Do some experiments with different JPEG qualities to see what works best for you.
8. Not using a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
CDN is a great and ideal way to give website boost up and let it load within a second or three. Also, CDN can solve the problem of slow servers and hostings.
If you’ve got worldwide audience, you need to be quick in every corner of the world, and that’s what is CDN for. CDN will host static files from your website on servers and deliver it over the other side of the globe.
Your website will be served from the nearest server from the location it is requested.
9. Too many ads and Pop-ups
Google Adsense and many similar sites are an extra source of income but they can also slow down your site.
There are many sites who has ads in header, sidebars, body and bottom of the page. You can check them as those site will always take tons of time to load.
Solution is, not one page should have ads more than 2 or 3 max. It is good that you balance both things; ads and your site.
10. Incorrect dimensions of images
This is a very usual problem that happens in almost all the sites. You should always get the perfect size of that dimension to make the image of the same size. For example, Your website is going to take loading time if you are uploading 1200 x 600 pixels instead of 600 x 300 pixels.
Now, you get it? Solution is, try changing the resolution and dimensions of the image before uploading instead of using the original one. This will really help a lot to change the loading speed of the website.
So, that’s all! These are the points that you have to take care of to the edge to make your website quick and you can grow faster through your website. Check out our other takes on WordPress plugins and Magento extensions. Of course, you can comment below if you have any queries or questions.
Thank you!
