Website loading speed is a sensitive topic for a lot of website owners. Faster-loading websites are ranked higher than their slower counterparts in search engines. Experience has proven that they also keep visitors’ attention for a more extended period, thus reducing the bounce rate on the site.
A wide misconception of this complicated metric (website speed) is often mistakenly accepted to be entirely reliant on the web hosting server. While it is essential to have a web hosting server designed to provide speed and performance, creating a website that has optimised code, content, and structure is far more beneficial.
Both these criteria are interconnected and bolster each other for an excellent performance overall.
Here are the most common reasons why you may experience a slow website:
- Unoptimised media content – Media files, such as images and videos, tend to be large and consume lots of bandwidth while loading.
- Excessive overhead – Logs, transients, and other entries from plugins or themes tend to build up over time. Too much of this can cause database queries to take longer than necessary.
- No content delivery network (CDN) – Network latency is a common issue for websites not utilising a CDN service. It occurs when the physical distance between the user and the origin server is too big.
- No caching layer – Caching refers to storing a copy of your website files in a web cache. Without it, the client’s browser must request your website’s assets from your origin server every time instead of accessing them from their local or intermediary cache.
- Heavy traffic – A web server can only handle requests from a certain amount of visitors at any given level. Once that amount surpasses, the page will load slower. The heavier the traffic, the slower the website.
Of course, there are many more reasons why you could be experiencing slow loading speed. However, the above highlights the universal problems and should give you an idea of the direction you should look to solve them.