Slow loading websites don’t do anyone any good. It’s bad for your business, and it’s bad for your visitors. In this article, you’re going to learn the top 5 culprits which cause websites to load slowly on people’s web browsers.
- Unoptimized media files
When you upload unoptimized media files to your site, it puts additional strain on your server because it has to serve all those heavy files to your visitors. It consumes a lot of bandwidth and slows down your site considerably. So, what you need to do is to optimize your image files and your video files (these are the 2 most common media files uploaded to websites).
- Excessive HTTP requests
Every time someone visits your site, their browser sends an HTTP request to your web server asking it to send your files to them. Each file on your site is equivalent to one request. So, if you’ve got a lot of files like CSS, Javascript, and image files on your web pages, then you’re going to get excessive HTTP requests. To reduce this, you can use CSS image sprites and minify your CSS and JavaScript files.
- Too many ads
Ads are great for those who want to have an additional income stream for their site. You can sell banner ad space, you can sign up for Google Adsense and other similar ad programs. However, each ad you serve on your site creates additional HTTP requests which can slow down your site’s loading times. Now, you don’t have to rid your site of ads – you just need to be selective and remember your users don’t go to your site to check out your ads!
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- Non-use of caching techniques
Caching your website files will help speed up your site. Instead of your server directly serving your files to everyone who visits your site (and thus causing performance issues), caching techniques put less stress on your server by serving up a static HTML file of your site. It makes your site load faster and your visitors happier.
- Unclean code
Your website is a bunch of codes and files. When you have an unclean code, you will inadvertently affect your site’s performance especially if one file conflicts with another file’s code. This is especially true in WordPress plugins. People install plugins left and right without realizing some don’t play well with others and can even cause their site to slow down.