By: Team WTI | Date: June 8, 2021

Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Web Maintenance, Website Backup & Monitoring,

Tags: SEO, SEO Articles, Site Speed, Slow Website, Team WTI, Web Hosting, Web Maintenance,

When thinking of getting more revenue for your business, your first instinct may be to get more traffic on your website, but sometimes getting LESS traffic for your company’s website may be the best course of action. Many times you will want to make the most of the traffic that is already present by increasing loading speeds on your site. When talking conversions for your business, every second counts! With every second that passes on a loading screen, a company’s conversion rate goes down by 7%.

As one can see from the chart below, the longer the loading time, the odds of a potential customer clicks off of your page increases. On a positive note, there are many ways to help with slow loading speeds, but first, it might help to know what makes a website loading time long in the first place.

5 Ways You Are Slowing Down Your Website

1. Web Hosting

Depending on your website’s traffic, if a web hosting server is not set up correctly it can put added stress on the server, making loading speeds slower.

2. Word Press Configuration

If your WordPress site is not serving cached pages, then it can overwhelm WordPress servers resulting in slow load times or your website crashing entirely.

3. Page Size

If your page has a large amount of data on it, mainly coming from large images that are not properly optimized for the web, may result in longer wait times for pages.

4. Bad Plugins

Poorly coded and unnecessary plugins bloat your website’s data causing slower load times.

5. External Scripts

External scripts such as ads, font loaders, and other third-party scripts often have an immense impact on a screen’s load times.

5 Ways you Can improve Website Loading Speeds

1. Move your site to a different host

Choosing a fast and reliable web host is the first and the most important step in having quick and efficient loading times.

2. Optimize image size

Since images can hold a lot of data and in turn, making slow web speeds, it is important that images are compressed and optimized for your website.

3. Reduce the number of plugins

Since it takes a great deal of support to run plugins, it is good to trim the number of plugins that are on your website.

4. Minimize the amount of JavaScript and CSS Files

If your site has a good amount of JavaScript and CSS, it will lead to numerous HTTP requests when users are browsing your website, causing longer load times. To combat this reducing the number of JavaScript and CSS files will help improve website loading speeds.

5. Compress Data

Compressing data such as images and fonts on your website will greatly reduce the size of the files. Compressing files before sending them to your site will greatly reduce HTTP requests and website loading speeds.

The Good News

Although your business may be hurting from long loading times, there are a plethora of ways to improve speeds to get you and your business where it needs to be for optimal conversions. Here at Team WTI, we are here to help! Contact us to see how you can get the most out of your website!