Online users do not appreciate slow website speed. Its sluggish loading speed can frustrate users, which certainly brings down engagement rates. This directly impacts its search engine rankings, which decreases the count of customers’ inquiries. It will obviously slow down the inflow of revenues. Overall, a slow website can adversely impact your business’s revenue.

Because of this, it is necessary to fix the causes of slow websites.

Why the Website Runs Slowly and How to Do Quick Fixes?

Many reasons can hamper the fast loading of websites. Here are the most common reasons:

Large Image Files

Image files can slow down the loading speed, which hampers overall website performance. Actually, high-resolution images significantly take time to upload. So, the images must be optimized to increase the overall load time of websites.

Quick Fix:

• Hire a website designer to compress and resize web images before uploading them. These images can be compressed with tools like TinyPNG, JPEGmini, etc. They can automatically minimize file sizes without compromising their quality. Some professional designers convert images into an optimized file format like WebP, which automatically compresses them.
• Lazy loading can be introduced to the website so that all images won’t load at once. If you allow all images to load together, it can result in lengthy loading. So, the lazy loading technique is used to delay the loading of a few images while minimizing the initial load time.
• The Content Delivery Network, or CDN, can be used to store copies of web images on different servers. It helps in delivering a fast-loading experience through a server that is geographically closer to the user. This hack speeds up load time.

Excessive HTTP requests

As a user visits the website, its browser raises multiple HTTP requests to load web elements like images, scripts, and stylesheets. These multiple requests can also hamper its speed.

Quick Fix

Since a visit sends multiple HTTP requests, expert designers can combine multiple CSS and JavaScript files to form a file. This practice minimizes the number of HTTP requests. You can speed up this task by using Gulp or Webpack-like tools.

• In order to minimize the count of CSS files that require fetching over and over, combine critical CSS inline with HTML files.
• Eliminate useless plugins if your web design has a CMS like WordPress. You can deactivate and delete unnecessary plugins. Each one has its own set of HTTP requests, which can make your website sluggish.
• Additionally, combining multiple small images into a single image file, namely a CSS sprite, can minimize loading time. Use CSS background positioning to display the most appropriate part of the image.

Unoptimized Code

Lengthy and unoptimized code by excessively using JavaScript, long CSS, outdated code, and JavaScript files can hamper web speed.

Quick Fix

• In order to minimize code size, tools like UglifyJS for JavaScript and CSSNano can remove unnecessary characters like whitespace, comments, line breaks, etc. It reduces file size and improves load times.
• Regulate web auditing so that unused or outdated code can be identified. Browser developer tools and plugins like PurifyCSS can make it smoothly doable.
• Load JavaScript files at different times so that the rendering can be smooth and glitch-free. Web designers use the “async” or “defer” attribute to your script tags.
• Avoid unnecessary CSS loading initially. Prioritize loading essential files in the beginning and load the rest of the files at different times. You may use the “media” attribute or tools like Critical CSS to achieve this goal.

Poor server performance

A web server plays a critical role when it comes to quickly loading websites. The obvious reasons for poor loading speed can be shared hosting, inadequate server resources, and obsolete server software.

Quick Fix

• A shared hosting plan can hamper the loading speed of the website, which can be fixed by upgrading it to a VPS, virtual private server, or dedicated hosting plan that prioritizes better resource allocation and performance.
• Adapt to a CDN, or content delivery network, to distribute the load across multiple servers. Content delivery from multiple servers that are closely placed can reduce load times.
• Continue to clean and optimize your website’s data so that it can run efficiently. Removing old and obsolete revisions and spam comments can help optimize it.
• Store frequently accessed data in the memory of your server-side caching solutions like Memcached or Varnish. This solution will reduce the need for dynamic pages for each request.

Keep your server software, like Apache and database management systems, up-to-date to leverage improved performance and security.

Excessive Use of External Resources

Excessive use of external resources like third-party scripts, fonts, and ads can also slow down your website speed. You should remember that each external resource adds additional HTTP requests. These requests may remain hidden if the server is slow or unreliable. This is also a common reason for a slow web experience.

Quick Fix

• Try to host resources like fonts and scripts on a local server instead of deploying them on external servers. This can prevent uncertain delayed load times on third-party servers.
• Minimize the use of third-party scripts. Use only the necessary ones to optimize web resources. If third-party scripts are used, load them at different times or delay their loading until the main content loads.
• If you’re using external resources, use DNS to prefetch before raising any request. It will minimize latency. Web designers can try <link rel=”dns-prefetch” href=”//example.com”> to your website’s HTML head for it.
• Implement subresource integrity, or SRI, so that third-party resources remain untampered. This hack proves helpful in improving security and potential slowdowns because of external scripts.

Conclusion

A slow website speed delivers a bad user experience, which ultimately impacts business leads and performance online. The aforementioned reasons are the most obvious causes of slow web speed, which can be fixed as per shared suggestions.