It can be frustrating when your website starts running slowly, both for you and your visitors. People visiting your site don’t want to have to wait for pages to load and you don’t want to lose traffic due to a slow site.
When you notice things are slowing down, it is essential that you partner with a website design company that can find out what’s going on. Chances are website design services will uncover one of these common problems as the culprit.
1. Issues with the Hosting Server
The first place that a website design company will look to determine why a site has slowed down is the host server. If your site is hosted on a shared server, this is more likely to happen.
The further the server is from the place where the request is made, the slower the response will be. A good way to combat this is by keeping your site hosted on its own server and mirroring your site across multiple servers.
2. Large Images and Graphics
Although the internet moves faster now than ever before, large image and graphic files can still take longer to load and slow down your website. Text graphics are notorious for doing the same. Good image optimization and moving away from unnecessary image files is critical for maintaining fast page load speeds.
3. Webpage Redirects
Website design services use redirects to send users from an outdated webpage to a new version of the same page. This means it will take a little longer for the user to reach the right page.
While redirects do serve an important purpose for maintaining the SEO a page has generated, they should be used judiciously.
4. Too Many Website Design Elements
Like large images and graphic files, the more elements a website design has on a single page, the slower the pages will load. Elements like images, graphics, social media buttons, CSS and JavaScript code all increase the number of RTT requests made to the server whenever a page is accessed. The more RTT's requested for a single page, the slower that page will load.
5. Excess and Outdated Code
Heavily coded pages that have a lot of poorly written code, extra code left behind after design updates, and outdated code should be replaced with newer, faster code.
This is yet another cause for slow site loading. As any expert website design company can tell you, there is more to updating website code than just adding it to the page.
Old code must be removed and function between old and new bits of code must be maintained.
6. Too Many Plugins
Plugins are other elements that can slow down a website. As useful as they may be, website design services should use them sparingly because of the way plugins can slow a site down.
7. A Lot of Web Traffic
One last reason for a slow site and one that may not seem too bad is too much web traffic. Naturally, a lot of traffic is great for business; however, this is only true if your server can handle the traffic.
If you’re getting a lot of clicks and the site is slowing down, this is a good sign that you need to upgrade your hosting to a faster server that can handle more traffic.
In Conclusion
If you begin to notice slower page load times or an increase in bouncebacks, there may be a problem with your website design that needs some attention.
Website design services find these issues are notorious for affecting site performance. Make sure to work with an experienced website design company that can give your site a necessary tune-up to ensure lightning fast load speeds!