How to fix slow website loading

Check out our easy tips to Make Your Website Faster

Sloth-like Slow Load speed results in high bounce rates and is the number 1 killer for sales.

So what can you do to make your website faster?

There are usually two main culprits affecting your site's speed, and they’re either your website or your hosting provider. We unpick these below.

As a starting point, how quickly should your website load? Depending on the size of your website and its purpose, a 1-2 second load speed can be considered fast. For websites with load speeds of 3-5 seconds, this is still okay, but you’re likely to notice higher bounce rates and fewer sales compared to faster-loading sites. Anything longer shall need remedying fast.

You can check your website loading time by using free solutions like GTMetrix and Pingdom. These solutions shall also pinpoint some areas where you can start improving.

1. Optimise your images

Check your image sizes and image format. High-resolution images consume lots of bandwidth, causing slow-to-load web pages. It’s true that modern, sleek websites rely on stunning visuals to capture and engage their audience, and often if not compressed correctly, these high-definition images wreak havoc on your load speed and bounce rate.

2. Fix Java script issues

Make sure you audit your javascript bloated code can be a real culprit for slowing your website load speed. One easy solution is to minify your javascript and CSS. Check out CSSNano and UglifyJS, these are great tools to help speed up your web page HTML, CSS and Javascript code.

3. Switch hosting provider

Your hosting provider has a huge impact on your website performance.
Choosing a hosting provider that offers performance optimisation services included in the price of your hosting is paramount to ensure you’re getting the optimal speed for your site.  

4. Use a CDN

A content delivery network shall distribute your files from local networks close to where the person browsing your website is located. This maximises your website connection and availability as it presents a cached version of your static content from the closet server to the person viewing your web page. Cloudflare is a great CDN solution and is our chosen provider.

5. Take care of Caching

Make sure you’re setting browser caching for your website so that the user only has to download your website once. When storing content in a database, make sure your database queries are cached. This will ensure that any future request for the same content gets delivered from the user's local cache, resulting in a fast browsing experience. 

Need support with speeding your website up, contact our team, and we can walk you through the process.

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