Slow website? See what you could be losing!

Your website's speed has a big impact on its success. If your website does not load quickly, your visitors may leave before they see the content or what you have to offer.

If you use the internet, you surely hate slow websites too! 😒 It is estimated that most users will not wait more than 4 seconds for a website to load. In this article, we explain some of the reasons why websites can become slow and how to stop that from happening.

1. Too Many Plugins Installed

Today it is easier to build a website with platforms such as WordPress, Drupal and others. These platforms give users a foundation, but they are limited to certain options, and sometimes you need to install plugins.

In most cases, these plugins need extra styles (CSS) and JavaScript (JS) to work properly. That means more code for your browser to process to display a page, and more HTTP requests to load it.

Avoid installing too many plugins, and check whether you really need all of them enabled. There is no specific number of plugins: badly written plugins can use far more resources than they need and have a big impact on your website's loading time.

2. Image Compression

If your website has a lot of images (or even just a few), be aware that images have a big impact on how your website loads. So image compression is a step worth considering: you can save up to 70% in size and loading time for each compressed image without sacrificing quality.

3. Cache

Every time you open a website, several resources are loaded (images, scripts and HTML). To avoid loading this content every time, and to save requests to the server, browsers have a cache option. It temporarily stores, for example, a particular image on your computer, so that when you open a page again it does not need to load it again.

The cache can be configured directly on the server with dedicated modules, or through the configuration of your web server, such as Nginx, Apache, etc., by setting an expiry time for each file type (Example: images stay in the cache for 2 days, etc.)

3. Optimise CSS and JS

Compressing styles and scripts is an important step you should consider. It stops unnecessary white space, comments and "junk" from being loaded by the user. By compressing styles and scripts (minify), you can save up to 70% in size and loading time on your website.

4. Server or Hosting

The server your website runs on can also affect its speed. If you have already optimised your website and still notice it is slow, your hosting or server may be the problem. In that case, you can contact the company responsible and ask them to look into the cause, or in some cases switch to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a dedicated server, which will give your website more exclusive resources. Standard hosting is usually shared by dozens of customers, which can sometimes make your website slow when the server it sits on is congested.

Possible server-level optimisations include setting up caching (mod_cache for Apache, for example), enabling compression (GZIP) and more.

If you have any questions about optimising your website, do not hesitate to get in touch! 😸