There’s nothing more annoying than trying to reach a website you need to use only to find out it’s loading slowly. This is the main reason why numbers can fail for any business website, whether it’s a massive company like YouTube (yes, even their site can experience loading difficulties!) or a small one like your own. A slow website can mean disaster for any business wanting to be successful online!
With that in mind, there are a lot of reasons why a website may have a tough time loading up. Here are the top eight things that are slowing your business’s website down right now, and why.
- Poorly optimized images
There is indeed such a thing as having images that are way, way too big and consisting of so much high-definition pixilation on any website. Add in the possible likelihood that they are poorly optimized (no alt or title text, or the pictures in question were never compressed) and you’ve got a poor loading time on your hands.
Solution: compress the images so that they’re not exceeding megabytes or terabytes worth of data. Kilobytes are enough to help an image both look beautiful and prevent loading times from slowing down to a crawl.
- Outdated plugins
Outdated plugins are not only unsafe for business websites, they’re also a potential reason your site is loading so slowly. If there are a lot of features you want to include on your website such as videos or animated sliders, to name a few examples, those also require plugins to work properly. If any one of these features doesn’t work, the whole website will suffer for it.
Solution: update the plugins, or replace the ones that don’t work anymore with more up-to-date and efficient ones. Simple as that. If you are on one of our maintenance plans already, this is something you won’t need to worry about; it will be taken care of.
- Too much traffic
Yes, even too much traffic can be a cause! You know the saying “Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing”? This is one such example. While a lot of traffic does mean your website is appealing to would-be customers, it can also mean a traffic jam—not something that anyone enjoys being stuck in!
A web server is only capable of serving a certain number of people all at once, just like a real brick-and-mortar shop. The more people who come in to be served, the slower their service will be. Plus, additional resources would have to be called in for help, such as extra staff to serve everyone. But now, the backend stuff is slowing down just as well!
The same deal applies to your website. Your server will do its best to manage all that traffic, but it’s got to slow down somewhere.
Solution: usually poor server performance is due to bad hosting as well. Upgrading your hosting package will help with traffic overload.
- Network problems
Sometimes if your website is loading slowly it’s due to a problem with your local network.
Solution: it’s very simple. Check another website and see whether it’s also very slow to load. If so, it’s a network problem. If not, then it’s a problem with your own website. Again, having a good hosting package and plan in the first place can prevent network issues for your site from happening unless your Internet provider goes down (it happens).
- Worst of all: bad hosting
This is the biggest mistake everyone tends to make when they get a website made, because the server that usually hosts their website is cheap in price…and usually, that means it’s cheaply made. You get what you pay for, so the saying goes, and that definitely applies to hosting too.
Usually the cheaper purchase is made because the business is only starting up, or there’s budget cuts to be made to save money. Cheap hosting is not worth spending your money on though! Instead, it’s best to pay good money for a really good hosting package. That way, you don’t have to pay later should any of the other problems we’ve listed here arise.
There are more reasons that a website can load slowly, but these five in particular are a few of the worst worth mentioning. Sometimes a website can have one, more or all of these things and continuing to run the website as is will hurt your business itself. Why not get a website built from the ground up that you know will work when it’s launched? If this sounds like what you really want most, give our professionals at V3 Media a call and we can make it happen. If you need to think that idea over first, the best way is to have a one-on-one consultation. You make the call, and we’ll meet you halfway where you need us to be.