by Jerry Mooney
There are a lot of mistakes that you can make that will make users hate your website but slow loading times are definitely the worst. Nobody has the patience to sit around waiting for ages for a web page to load and most people won’t bother. They’ll take their business elsewhere and find a company with a website that loads quickly. Sites that have slow loading times get fewer conversions so it’s not something that you can just ignore. The bad news is, there are a lot of different reasons for slow loading times so it might take you a while to work out what’s going on. The good news is, those problems can all be fixed once you’ve worked out what’s slowing your website down. These are some of the most common causes that you should check for.
Hosting Services
When you first start your business and you haven’t got a huge amount of traffic coming to your website, you shouldn’t have too much of an issue with your hosting. But as the traffic increases and you start adding more features to the site, your current server might not cut it anymore and the loading times will slow right down. If that’s the case, you might need to consider a new hosting service. Using a virtual private server (VPS) instead of a physical one gives you access to a lot more space and can speed up your website a lot. Visit https://www.mvps.net for more information on the benefits of using a VPS. Having that extra space available will be useful in the future when you come to expand the website and get even more visitors.
Templates
When you’re building a website for your business and you’re trying to keep the costs low, using Wordpress is a good option. It’s a great platform for SEO, it’s cost effective and, while you can only create a fairly basic site, it’ll give you everything that you need. However, you might run into problems with your loading times on Wordpress. You’ll have to pick a template and some of them are a lot better than others. Most of them are fine but some will load very slowly. This is an easy thing to change so if you’re experiencing slow loading times, try a few different ones and see whether there is any change. You might find that the problem is fixed right away.
Too Much Content
Giving good content to your users is important, but don’t go overboard with it. If you fill the website with too many photos and videos that autoplay as soon as you land on the page or put loads of animations on there, it’s going to grind to a halt. All of that stuff takes a while to load up so you need to be careful how much you’re putting on each page. Keep the site simple and focus on usability.
These aren’t the only reasons that your site is slowing down so if you’ve made these changes and it’s still not working right, you might need to call an IT professional.