Is your website too slow? Are you losing income because of sluggish loading times? Optimizing your website speed is essential to retaining your audience and generating traffic. Keep reading to find out the top 5 reasons why your website is so slow.
By MEGAN SHAPIRO
1. Unoptimized Images
While it’s great to have high-resolution images, they can take up a ton of bandwidth. Typically smaller sized images help to reduce the loading time, while maintaining the high-resolution. This ensures you maintain a quality website, while also ensuring an optimal user experience.
Another factor to consider is what type of image file you are uploading to your site. PNG and GIF images take up much more bandwidth than the standard JPEG. Additionally, anything over 1MB is too big.
2. Unclean Code
Unclean code can drastically slow down your site. Excessive white space, empty lines, and unnecessary comments can all make your website run at a less than optimal speed.
Removing unnecessary elements by compressing code and reducing file sizes, will reduce the loading time of the site. Consequently, you’ll most likely see improvement in your SEO performance.
3. Too Many Ads
While displaying ads to monetize your website can be extremely beneficial, if you have too many ads, it can actually decrease your profit margins. Many owners think more is better, but in this case having too many ads can slow down your site and cause users to search other platforms.
Ads that have HTTP requests need additional processing time. Moreover, ads that are rich in media, such as pop unders and auto downloads, can create hundreds of HTTP requests.
In sum, it is important to create a balance between too much and too little advertisement on your site. Only use ads when it will improve performance and UX.
4. Bad Hosting
The web hosting provider you use makes a HUGE difference to your websites performance. At Melrose Domains and Melrose Studios, we ensure you are getting the best service possible.
If you have tried all of the above, and your website is still slow, there is a good chance you should reconsider your hosting provider. Melrose Studios offers performance optimization to ensure your users have the best experience.
5. No CDN Service
A CDN service helps ensure that your website is running at peak performance speeds. Depending on your geographic location of users on your site, the content gets served by the node located at the closest data center. Thus, it minimizes the round-trip-time (RTT) and provides content at a much faster speed.
At Melrose Domains, we use the free version of the plug-in Jetpack, to giver users the best experience possible.
