Your website can be a great tool for your business or blogging goals as well as being a source of income generation. Unless you have a decent number of visitors coming from different internet streams, it will be hard to attain your goals. Because of this, getting traffic is one of the most crucial aspects of a successful website, and making sure you have a fast website loading speed will help achieve that.

As you make specific efforts to bring in more traffic to your blog, you have to be mindful of other things that can drive away a ton of that audience away from your site even before they get to see the value you have to offer them.

One of those significant things is your website loading speed.

Think about it. How would you react if Google recommends some sites in response to the search query you made, only to discover that the recommended ones take forever to load up?

As many others would, I guess you’ll be frustrated or leave that site for another, which can provide you with the same value you are looking for, but in a shorter time.

Unfulfilled anticipation can frustrate visitors to your site and, the chances are that most will bounce off and leave your website.

How Fast Should My Website load?

You might be wondering the appropriate page load time for your site to load within, and what is considered too slow for loading.

This varies from one industry to another.

From Google’s point of view, a website should load within a recommended 2 seconds, while ideally you should aim for half a second.

According to this research, 25% of users will abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load.

When it takes above 10 seconds for a site to load, users tend to lose focus on a site.

There is no standard for web pages to load, so we have to go by recommendations.

The Google recommended speed must be your target and the more you can decrease the seconds, the better.

Some individuals can’t stand even a few seconds, so the greater the decrease in page load time, the more the reduction in terms of bounce rate.

How to Track Your Website Loading Speed

Now that you have a glimpse of the recommended page load time for a website let’s get familiar with some tools you can use to initiate your web speed test.

Below are some of the tools you can use to monitor your page load speed.

You can use any of the above names as tools to initiate the web speed test of your site pages.

If it is within the red zone, you may want to get it fixed.

It would be best if you uncovered the reasons behind the poor loading speed of your site so that you can find a lasting solution for the problem.

That is why in this blog post, we’ll be discussing some of the things that could slow down your website speed.

Without further ado, here we go.

Things That Slow down the Speed of a Website

1. Web Hosting

When creating your site, it is essential to do your homework by researching the hosting provider to host your site.

Not only the web hosting provider, but you should also consider the hosting plan you are subscribing to.

Shared hosting is one of the most economical and happens in some cases to influence your bandwidth.

However, going for a suitable plan for your kind of site would be your best bet.

If the issue is from your hosting provider, you can port to any other at your convenience.

2. Out-of-Date CMS

Using an outdated version of your content management system can cause several issues.

One of the issues is that your site can be vulnerable to attacks making its loading speed slower.

However, you may need to update your content management system to a later or, better still, its latest version.

Most CMS will keep you posted once a new update is out.

You may want to follow their recommendation to vibe with the improvements that go with improved website performance.

3. Images

Images are significant contributing factors that determine a page load time of a site.

Hence whenever you seek recommendations about your site and speed several online forums and social media community blogging threads, point you to images.

When you add images that have large file sizes, the chances are that users will experience more delays when loading pages on your site.

Maintaining your image quality is also essential, and thankfully, you can resize your images without losing much of the quality.

You may also change your image file formats and see which format best serves your image in a possible smaller size.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with lazy loading.

It simply means instead of loading the entirety of a particular page of your site; the page will load the only point the user screen is viewing.

In the case of lazy loading, the user scrolls down, and more and more parts of the page keep loading.

Several WordPress plugins can help implement lazy loading on your site to reduce the effects of images in slowing your website loading speed.

4. Chatbots

Implementing chatbots on your site, especially to relate with customers, has enormous potentials for businesses.
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However, their codes, on the other hand, can interfere with the speed of your site.

That is why it is essential to route your chatbots to different servers.

5. Ad Codes

Getting paid from your site is essential and happens to be the reason why thousands of websites come up daily.

One way to monetize your log is by embedding the Ad codes of advertising networks on your site to run personalized ads.

Most of the Ad codes issued have javascript in them and can influence the speed of a website.

It is advisable that you opt for aggressive advertising or adding several Ad codes on your site, affecting the user experiences and how your pages load.

6. Distant Server Location

Every website has a target audience and a targeted location. Some sites may target a worldwide audience that isn’t too broad in correlation to their objectives.

However, the closer your target is, the faster they’ll load your site from the servers you are hosting.

For example, if you are in Canada but targeting the U.S audience, it is a great idea to host your site with a hosting provider based in the U.S.

This way, the audience is closer to the servers, which means the page load speed would be superb.

Compared to when distant.

So, what about those targeting a worldwide audience or within different locations?

At this point, it’s great to leverage Cloudflare or CDN, which can assist in loading your site resources from closely hosted servers from every visitor.

7. Failing to Leverage Cross-Platform Services

When your server gets overloaded, it becomes sluggish in terms of page load speed.

When you want to overhaul, you should consider one thing: this is nothing far from the files you are hosting on your site.

For example, you can use Youtube to uploading your videos for free and take charge of your privacy.

Instead of uploading on your web server, you can leverage YouTube and then embed the video link on your site.

Secondly, whether you want to share music files, software, or apps, among others, there are a couple of file-sharing sites you can upload on.

You can then embed the links on your site from where users can download.

This way, you have little to no reason to worry about overwhelming your database with large-sized files.

8. HTTP Requests

HTTP requests directly correlate to the speed of a website. If more requests are handled per session by your server, it can reflect your website loading speed.

Every element on your site needs an HTTP request to showcase in a user browser.

When there are more elements to be loaded on a site, this means there’ll be more HTTP requests relative to the number of elements.

That’s why you should maintain the utmost simplicity in your web pages in any way you can.

9. Traffic

Similar to your PC, the more files you are copying or sending to/from another device, the more time they’ll take queuing before getting sent.

That is relative to the web server, as too much traffic tends to overwhelm the servers and cause your site to slow down.

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10. Too Many Active Plugins

If you are on WordPress, you’ll get a handful of plugins to activate on your site that performs their respective purposes.

These all have their advantages on your site.

Having several plugins would come to its detriment when it comes to website speed.

All the plugins send their file requests individually.

The plugs contain lines of JavaScript codes and Cascading Style Sheets that weigh their respective burden on your site.

A great way to tackle this is to uninstall the less essential plugins on your site and the ones you aren’t using in the meantime.

11. Link Rots

Link rot affects websites in different aspects; they directly affect the user experiences and make them lose their hopes and trust in you.

It also sends a strong signal to search engines by causing an increase in your bounce rate.

Not only do these link rots have the potentials to affect your web page speed, but they are also broken links.

There’s also just a minor difference between the two, but in this context, they’re similar.

Link rots consume your bandwidth immensely.

Fixing Link rots help decrease the time needed for your web pages to load.

There are a couple of tools you can use to detect broken links on your site.

You can employ a fix, and if you’re looking for some, below are a few you may try.

A study made by “Akamai” yielded that a “100-millisecond delay in load time could cause a site conversion rate to drop down by about 7%.”

This tells that there is more audience to lose, simply from being reckless with the speed of a website.

Considering the difficulty of getting decent traffic coming to one’s site, it isn’t a risk worth taking.

Like every ailment, knowing the source of the problem would come in handy when administering an antidote.

This is no difference for web page speed.

It will help if you start by knowing the issue behind your slow website loading speed. You can then employ a fix once and for all.

The 11 things that slow down your site are worth noting.

And after fixing the issues, it is essential to employ website management best practices, so you don’t have to go through more hassles.

Which of these 11 slowing factors has been affecting your website loading speed?