The significance of website speed becomes clearer while looking at the number of people purchasing online. According to a study conducted in 2020, over 2 billion people purchased goods and services online during the pandemic. If your website is difficult to navigate, doesn’t open up links in newer tabs, or is quite slow to load images and videos, the customer is not likely to come back. Website speed is also a significant factor in determining the Google rankings of your website, organic traffic, and ultimately, the conversion rates.

What causes Slow Loading time?

Slow loading times can frustrate the existing loyal customers, which can have a serious impact on revenue. As such, it is important to understand what causes slow loading time for websites. If your business website is operated by a content management system like WordPress or Squarespace, you must be using plug-ins to add to the functionality of the website. Sometimes these third-party plug-ins are not of high quality and might result in a slow web page. Some free or un-updated plug-ins also might cause security issues, thus risking the safety of website visitors. Keeping the usage of plug-ins to a minimum, only using plug-ins from reputable sources, and updating them regularly are some strategies to avoid this issue. Another factor that might likely increase the loading time of your website is large file sizes. Pages with numerous interactive elements, plenty of images, and videos will take longer to load. Minimizing the usage of custom fonts on your web pages, compressing all images, etc., are some strategies that can decrease the loading time. Badly written HTML codes can be another reason for slow websites. Improving your site’s performance requires optimization of codes for speed. If your website’s Java and PHP scripts are firing unnecessarily, it can cause a slower loading time. Employing lazy loading is one strategy that can help you in such situations. Lazy loading helps in reducing the page size by avoiding loading scripts that are unnecessary as soon as a customer visits your website. Yet another frequent reason for slower loading time is the inadequate bandwidth used by a web page. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transferred from a server to a browser in a specific unit of time, and the more traffic a website has, the more bandwidth it requires. For example, a shopping website might get more traffic depending upon whether it is Black Friday or if some brand is launching a popular collection. There have been instances where such a high amount of traffic causes a website to crash. If you are expecting high traffic, optimizing your website’s bandwidth to cater to this demand is important. One strategy to solve bandwidth issues is to use a Content Delivery Network Service. Also, if you use CMS systems like WordPress or Shopify, be careful to choose plans with sufficient bandwidth.