One of the most common problems that web design teams are asked about by prospective clients is slow-loading websites. In this age where everything must happen quickly, slow websites can be frustrating and detrimental. The reasons for slow loading are varied, and often multiple issues occur simultaneously.

What Happens When You Have a Slow-Loading Website?

Here are nine statistics that can help you understand the role of a website’s loading speed:

• • At 47%, almost half of consumers expect a page to load in under 2 seconds.
  • With a 3-second loading wait time, 40% of shoppers leave the site.
  • If a website shows poor performance, almost 8 out of 10 shoppers won’t use the same site again.
  • According to a 2023 Website Loading Times Report, it takes a web page an average of 2.5 seconds to fully load on desktop and 8.6 seconds on mobile.
  • That said, 12% of mobile internet users expect pages to load faster on their phone while 46% expect sites to load equally or just as fast as on mobile and desktop.
  • After analysing 4 billion websites for one year, a study found that 68.2% of web visits are from mobile devices while only 29.5% are from desktops. Tablets make up the remaining 2.3% of web visits.
  • A B2B site that loads in just a second has a conversion rate that’s 5 times and 3 times higher compared to sites that take 10 seconds and 5 seconds to load respectively.
  • Goal conversation rate for a 1-second page load time is almost 40%, then drops to 34% at 2 seconds and 29% at 3 seconds.
  • Transaction conversation rate for a 1-second page load is 3.05%, then drops to 0.67% at 4 seconds.

These statistics paint a clear picture of the website load speed that you need to achieve and how it can affect you.

A slow website has significant consequences. Visitors may leave before the page loads, leading to lost opportunities for generating leads or sales. Additionally, poor user experience impacts search engine rankings, as Google views high bounce rates as a red flag.

To increase your website’s load speed, you need to identify and address the causes. Here are seven common reasons why your website might be loading slowly along with some tips on how you can resolve the issue:

1. Poor Choice of Hosting Provider or Plan

The low-quality servers of a sub-standard hosting provider can lead to a lower loading speed. Opt for a trustworthy hosting provider that supports high-performance data centres to improve your website’s loading time.

On top of this, if you get far more visits than what your hosting package can support, you might find your site experiencing some slowdowns. Make sure to increase your hosting package to accommodate higher bandwidth needs and maintain good load times. If you’re expecting to have a high volume of traffic, you may have to stay away from shared hosting and use a dedicated server.

2. Not Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN normally caches your site on many servers located all over the world, so visitors can download your files from the server nearest to their geographical location, making it faster for users. It can lead to much lower loading times, especially for websites with a lot of content.

Also, they reduce bandwidth, lighten the load on the server, and provide security against DDoS attacks. They help in balancing the traffic to prevent server congestion and make the user experience much smoother. For businesses with an audience that spans the globe, a CDN is necessary to ensure that your performance stays consistent and fast, no matter where your visitor is from.

3. Not Optimising Images

Large image file sizes can slow down your website. For starters, if your website theme only requires images with 600 x 600 pixels, stick to those dimensions. Using larger images when not needed will just increase loading time.

Another way to optimise the imagery in your website is to compress them before uploading. Compressing them manually instead of using a plugin to do it is recommended so it doesn’t strain your server.

Choosing the right image file type can also drastically affect the file size of your images. The image format developed by Google is the go-to now since it results in significantly lower file sizes while still being able to support lossless and lossy compression, alpha transparency, and animation. Basically, it can replace JPEG, PNG, and GIF and still come out the winner in terms of file size. Just make sure to first check if your website builder supports WebP before starting with the conversions.

You can use image editing tools like Photoshop and GIMP to rescale, compress, and save your images in the right image file type before uploading.

The final way to optimise your images is to combine them to create a CSS sprite. By doing this, you can improve your webpage performance since you’ll be cutting down the need to make multiple server calls. Then, you can use CSS to just show which part of the image you want to show on the specific parts of your page.

The image editing tools mentioned above can be used to create your CSS sprites. Alternatively, you can use a sprite sheet packer to do the job for you.

4. Not Using Caching Options

Caching techniques allow static files to be served quickly from the browser or server, reducing load times. When a browser caches your website, it creates a record of certain data regarding it, so that when the same user visits your website again, most of your website files will load more quickly, as there is no reason to re-download it. However, it needs to be a part of the coding of your website for the browser caching to work.

Doing this is easy on any cache plugin. That or you can specify an optimal caching policy on your web server with these headers: ETag, Cache-Control, Expires and Last Modified. Once enabled, you can use the Developer Tools from Chrome or the Web Console in Firefox to test.

If you’re enabling caching, don’t forget to do cache busting when you make any major changes to your website. To do this, you can change the file name version, file path version changes, or change query strings. This way, when the same user visits your website, their browser will know there are newer files and that it will have to download them to see the new version of the page.

5. Too Many Page Elements

Websites overloaded with content, scripts, style sheets, images, fonts, and other design elements can take longer to load. Each element will require an HTTP request that will have to reach its host server before coming back to the browser of the user. If you have too many page elements, that’s a lot of HTTP requests slowing down your website’s loading speed.

Simplify your website’s design by removing unnecessary elements to speed up loading times. There are web tools and plugins that you can use to check your website’s HTTP requests. Web browsers like Google also come with a built-in tool for developers that allows them to inspect a website’s network activity, such as HTTP requests.

6. Poor Coding

Inefficient or bloated coding can slow your website. Ensure your site is built by experienced developers who follow best practices to minimise server strain and improve performance.

If your website is on the larger side, poor coding can significantly slow your page down. This can be resolved by practising the use of optimised and compressed coding when the situation allows.

Some examples of how this can be implemented include the use of the proper data type to leverage minimum conversions. You can also go over your coding to see if there are any parts where you can simplify the coding or reach a certain result with a more efficient algorithm. For example, when you need to sort a larger dataset, why not skip bubble sort and go for the much faster quick sort instead?

7. Not Optimising for Mobile Devices

As mentioned before, mobile users account for almost 70% of web traffic. So, if you didn’t optimise your website for mobile devices, these users will be frustrated over the long loading time and click away. In fact, Google’s mobile-first indexing wherein their crawlers prioritise indexing the mobile version over the desktop version of websites speaks volumes.

It’s important to test your website across a range of devices to see if your website is lagging when it comes to mobile devices. You can even simulate scenarios with poor network conditions to check how well your website holds up.

If your website is still slow to load on mobile devices even after following the tips above, the culprit might be in the design. Web designers nowadays take a mobile-first approach and scale up from there. After all, mobile devices have limited resources compared to desktops. In this case, you might need to have your website rebuilt to be mobile-first.

Final Words

Slow and steady wins the race might be true for other things, but certainly not when it comes to your website speed. To prevent your visitors from clicking away, you’ll want to achieve a page load time of 0 to 2 seconds.

Improving your website’s load speed benefits user experience retains visitors, and boosts your SEO rankings. If you need help identifying or addressing these issues, reach out to Slinky Web Design for expert assistance.