Introduction:

We are pleased to have Shawn Byrne submit the following article, his bio is at to bottom of the post.

Things That Might Be Slowing Your Website Down

So you have a new website for your business, and it looks visually impressive.

The graphic design is superb, the fonts are just right, and the images are stunning. From the looks of things, you have a website that you can definitely be proud of.

However, a visually arresting website won’t do your business much good if it takes an eternity to load.

In a world where just about everyone seems to be in a hurry, few things are more annoying than a slow-loading website. After all, slow websites can affect everything, from your off-page and on-page SEO to customer engagement.

Let’s take a look at some of the things that may be slowing your website down.

Unoptimized Images

One of the likely culprits for your website’s slow load speed is the stunning images that make your site stand out visually.

Beautiful images on websites tend to have large file sizes, which can impact your website speed.

To speed up your website, you must optimize your images. Through image optimization, you should be able to reduce your images’ file sizes as much as possible, but without sacrificing quality.

You should also use JPEG images instead of the bigger PNG format to help make things go faster.

Too Many Plugins

Are you using WordPress as your website’s content management system or CMS? If so, you’re probably making good use of the various plugins available to its users.

While plugins add to or expand your website’s functionality, they can also be guilty of affecting page speed, as they require loading additional CSS and JavaScript files on the page.

Whenever a user visits that page, your site will load more assets, which can take it longer to load. Those assets will pile up when you add more plugins, so you can only imagine how slow your pages are going to be at a certain point.

As much as possible, keep only the plugins that you’re using and remove the rest to make your website load faster.

Hosting Issues

There are so many possibilities as to why your website is slow, but sometimes, it may just be a case of bad web hosting.

Web hosting is probably the most overlooked factor as far as website speed is concerned.

For web admins who don’t expect much traffic, a shared hosting plan will cut it. It’s cheaper and much easier to use.

However, if your site attracts plenty of visitors, there’s no way shared hosting will be enough. Your site’s performance will suffer if you stick with the limited bandwidth and RAM that a shared host provides.

If your site is stuck in a shared hosting plan, then that is probably the biggest reason your website is slow.

Switch to dedicated server hosting, and your pages will load much more quickly.

These are just a few of the factors that may be slowing your website down.

If you’re serious about achieving your business goals, you must do what you can to speed up the pages of your website. Check out the infographic below to see why that should be the case.