No one likes a slow website. Visitors don’t like it because they wind up spending more time than necessary to get the information they desired. Search engines don’t like it because they want to provide searchers with a great experience – and slow sites simply don’t deliver. Even with great white label digital marketing in place for other issues, site speed can get in your way. If your site is slow, that one issue could be holding you back from the kind of success you desire.
Here are four factors that can potentially contribute to a slow website.
#1 – Too Many Images
This is a basic one. While the high-speed internet that most people are able to access today makes it easier to load plenty of pictures – and videos, of course – you’ll still want to avoid weighing your site down too heavily with images. When a page is loaded up full of pictures and very little else, it may take that page a few moments to load. If you are going to be image-heavy on your site, be sure to at least optimize those images so they will load up in a reasonable amount of time.
#2 – Overdoing the Ads
If advertisements are a main part of your monetization strategy, it’s understandable that you will want to place them in various locations on your site. The more the better, right? Not necessarily. At some point, you are likely to see diminishing returns with regard to your advertising. If there are so many ads on your site that it slows down the performance of your pages, the net effect will not be a positive one. Do some testing and strike a balance between advertising and user experience.
#3 – A Lousy Host
It’s easy to take web hosting for granted. You sign up with one of the many web hosts available on the web today, you setup your account, and you forget about it. That might be okay in the beginning, but it could be a problem later on if your site grows in size and popularity. Always make sure that the web hosting account you are using is capable of handling the traffic you receive each day. It may be that you simply need to upgrade your account with your current host, or you might need to switch hosts in order to get the service you require.
#4 – Poor Quality Code
For many website owners, code is not something they think about regularly. Much of the coding today is behind the scenes, as content management systems like WordPress have made it possible to run your own site without touching any code. It’s worth remembering, however, that code is still at the heart of everything that happens on your site. If your site is slow and you can’t figure out why, consider the possibility that sloppy code is at the heart of the matter.
