Why is My Website Loading Slowly

As a website owner, you likely already know the importance of ensuring your site loads quickly. You know that even mere seconds can make all the difference between your visitors sticking around and going elsewhere to your competitors. You also know that if they do jump to a different site, there’s a strong likelihood that they’ll never return to yours.

Yet if you’re reading this article, what you probably don’t know is what’s currently slowing down your site and driving them away in the first place.

Indeed, it’s all well and good knowing that your website is currently performing slower than it should, but let’s be honest, it’s nigh on impossible to do anything about it until you’ve discovered where the issue lies.

To help you get to the bottom of your site speed issues, here’s a look at some of the more common reasons why your website could be loading slowly.

It could just be your connection 

We don’t mean to insult your intelligence, but it’s often the most obvious issues that we tend to overlook. Before we go any further, it’s worth double checking that it’s not your own internet connection that’s causing the problem.

You could use a tool like Speedtest to check if your connection is performing as it should. Alternatively, for a more practical solution, check out a few different sites and see if they’re loading as quick as you’d expect. If you can, try loading your site using a different internet connection.

If it’s still slow, and if those other sites load much faster than yours, it’s time to explore other possibilities.

Problems with your hosting 

These days, most web hosting or website builders promise unlimited bandwidth for your site, but it’s worth pointing out that unlimited in this case usually comes with a fair use policy. If you’re regularly exceeding your bandwidth, that could be causing the problem, in which case it might be time to upgrade

That said, it could be another issue entirely with your hosting account. It’s certainly helpful to check your hosting company’s status updates to see if they’re aware of any short term problems.

If not, you may be left with two options. First, contact your hosting provider to see if they can identify what’s causing the issue and if there’s anything they can do to help. Alternatively, you might be left with the last resort option of packing up your site and moving to a better host with a reputation for faster loading speeds.

Large image sizes 

Those huge images you uploaded to your site may look awesome, but if they haven’t been properly optimized for the web first, they can have a big detrimental impact on your loading times as the larger the image file size, the longer it takes to load those images. If you’re using Wordpress or another Content Management System, there’s a range of plugins out there that can help you to optimize your images for faster loading speeds.

If that still doesn’t solve the problem, you might want to explore replacing those images with other, smaller ones to see if that does the trick.

Your website code 

As a browser gets to work on loading your site, it needs to trawl through all that complicated back-end code to present your site the way it was intended. As you can imagine, that takes time, and again, the longer it takes, the slower your load speed.

For CMS users, this is where caching plugins come in real handy. Install one on your site, and they’ll get to work on creating static html pages that serve up your pages much quicker.