8 Slow Website Loading Causes and its Solution

Do you want to improve your conversions by making your websites load faster? There are plenty of factors involved behind the scenes that affect your website's performance. To do this, you need to monitor the website carefully.

Slow website speed is one of those factors that contribute to not being successful online. Slow website loading problem takes you nowhere. It costs you thousands of conversions and leads, and it is one of the most important to understand what is causing the website to load slowly.

As of March 2022, we haven't seen this speed factor being abundantly causing the downfall of your website keywords in SEO but soon it will be one of the most important SEO practices, We have been trying to figure out the main causes but let me tell you it doesn't happen easily and you should start working on it now so you can learn what actually causes these problems. The good thing is that we will list it down for you and minimize the learning process. 

Speeding up your website is not a requirement; it's a necessity to survive in the digital world. The tricky part is figuring out how.

When users come to your website, they expect it to be fast. If you don't create interest in users in 10 seconds, your website is doing a terrible job for you. 

The ideal website load time is 2 to 5 seconds, which heavily impacts the user experience (UX). An additional 100 milliseconds can drop your conversion rate to 7%.

John Miller of Elite SEM mentioned this in 2016

Focus on “dwell time” (how long site visitors spend with your content) rather than vanity metrics like pageviews. Creating quality content is extremely important because Google cares about how deep people navigate into your site, whether they hit the back button, and worst of all, whether they return to the search results page because they didn’t find the information they were looking for.

Importance of Website Speed

Google stated

 around 54% of mobile users leave a site immediately if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Good website speed helps you to negate bounce rate and page abandonment. A fraction of a second can make or break your website speed. Every second, you either make or lose a customer. It also makes a significant impact on search engine visibility and website traffic.

Ask yourself what you’ll do if the site loads too long.

You’ll switch to another site because you can get desired information from other sites quickly.

Website speed is also crucial for customer retention and reasonable conversion rates.

A strong web presence requires a smooth and flawless website, so you must feel the need for speed.

Here are some of the major causes of slow website performance and possible solutions for optimizing your website's performance.

Cluttered Code

Unclean code is the biggest culprit of slow websites. Take any slow-loading website example; messy code will be the primary cause.

Unnecessary components and comments, plenty of white spaces, and empty lines increase the stylesheet size of your website and cut it down.

If you discard these unnecessary elements, you can compress the code and shrink the file size.

It will improve your website's overall load time and positively impact your SEO. However, your developer will ignore these as it takes time, but you can access different online tools to identify errors and send them to your web development agency.

Unoptimized Images

A large number of unoptimized images can cut off your website speed. High-resolution images consume massive bandwidth while loading. Large image files put unnecessary weight on your website, making it slow. If you are using WordPress, some well-paid plugins can be used to optimize your images for all devices. 

You also have to consider the format of images while uploading them. Some photos are in web format. Use web format for images, which is a better-optimized size for the website. Then, you can take preventive measures accordingly.

Web Hosting Issues

In 2021, we noted that great hosting is important for ranking your website. Google wants you to invest in your website, which shows that the company is serious about doing business and can allow its users to use your services. 

We're here to tell you about the web hosting issues that allow these issues. 

- MySQL parameters need to be increased 

- In shared servers, the RAM needs to be released. It usually runs at the optimum level, which makes the server slow to respond. 

These issues are not solved by the hosting itself; you have to mention them to resolve this for you. Remember, our years of experience can help you with your website's slow issues from the hosting side. 

It is essential to select a hosting service with excellent customer service. We recommend ELEVEN2. They have the best customer service ever. They go out of their way to help you. 

Go for options that can provide performance optimization services at the hosting price. Most companies offer custom web servers and website development services to meet the needs of different customers.

If your web hosting provider allows you to run your web operations smoothly, you don’t have to think about switching. You need to identify the correct reason for your website's slowness.

No Use of Content Delivery Network

The content delivery network is a distributed network that carries independent servers. These servers are integrated into geographic places that provide high-performance and high-accuracy content to users. Based on your visitor’s location, the content is provided to the users. A node is used to serve data based on the nearest data center. It reduces the round-trip time and provides results to online users quickly.

If you have global visitors, CDN can help you minimize the burden on your site by caching the frequently accessed data and then distributing it to the data centers.

Round-trip-time is also reduced as a result of it, which provides content faster to your audience.

Not Using Caching Techniques

Caching techniques optimize website performance, and you are at a loss if you don't use them. This technique helps you store the data points that are used frequently in cached memory. When users look for particular content, cached memory serves them, speeding up the entire data-hunting procedure.

You can significantly improve your website performance by integrating HTTPS and server-side caching. From database queries to images, there are various things you can cache. Just ensure you don’t create any mess, set your priorities, and keep things clear.

Unoptimized JavaScript

You may have heard about JavaScript before, but do you know its importance in speeding up your website? JavaScript is small code that enhances your website's UI features. If implemented correctly, it can make your website faster. Optimizing it is essential to improving the delay time of your web pages.

Many old Javascripts are out of date, which causes render-blocking JavaScript that increases the page's load time.

You can counter this issue by using the inline JavaScript and removing the external JavaScript files. You may also defer JavaScript loading unless the page is not completely visible to the user.

Database Overhead

Overhead refers to irrelevant items in your website's database. It includes logs, transients, and different plugins that increase over time.

This overhead can prolong the database queries compared to the actual time.

Optimizing your database can remove the overhead. Most web hosts provide access to the database management platform via your hosting account, so you can optimize it this way.

It is important to address this issue on time. Otherwise, it will keep increasing the load on your database, eventually making your website work like a caterpillar.

Excess of Ads

Running ads is a great way to divert traffic to your site.

But it should not affect your website performance at any cost. If you cannot provide a good user experience, then you cannot build a powerful online presence, so limit ads on your site.

When you fill your website with ads, the HTTPS requests also increase, which increases the processing time. Media ads, including auto-downloads, pop-unders, and others, can make plenty of HTTPS requests. This can also affect your website's responsiveness.

Limiting ads on your site will significantly impact UX and CTR, which can generate significant traffic, leads, and, eventually, sales.

Final Words

When the web world was forming, nobody bothered about website load times. People just needed access to the web.

But now it's a different ball game altogether.

Fast-loading websites have great worth in Google’s eyes. With each passing year, your website must improve to compete in the highly competitive online world. You need to maintain your website regularly by taking care of the above-mentioned slow website loading causes that can possibly slow down your website.

Good website speed impacts your search engine visibility and your conversion rate. Every second you reduce the website load time, you evoke customers' trust and urge more users to visit your site.

You can use PageSpeed Insights to analyze your web page's speed. This will give you a clear idea of what is slowing down your website and how you can fix it.