Large images, bad hosting providers, and unoptimized code might be causing your website to load slowly. Luckily, there are ways to fix these problems—and you definitely should.

Load speed is a ranking factor on Google. It also determines how long a user stays on your site and what they remember about your brand. That’s pretty critical!

We explain why load speed matters, the most common elements that contribute to slow load speed, and how to fix slow load speed (hint: you can hire Omnizant).

Load speed matters because it affects your bottom line

Load speed affects the user experience—and it’s also a ranking factor on Google.

Let’s start with the user experience. Nearly 70% of people say that load speed affects their willingness to make a purchase online.

Using a slow-loading website is like trying to drive on a foggy road. You can’t go as fast as you want to go because you can’t get a full picture of the road ahead. It’s stressful, to say the least.

But unlike a driver on a foggy road, your website visitors are free to leave anytime. Rather than wait around, people will simply click away from your slow-loading site and go to a competitor instead. According to Google, 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load; three seconds, that’s all! In other words, you could be losing interested leads just because your load speed is subpar.

Sure, you might have a gorgeous website…when it loads, eventually. But the truth is that you cannot convert people if they click away before you can make your case. There is a direct correlation between a website’s load speed and your bottom line.

How do browsers render content and determine load speed?

Here’s a quick overview to help you understand how browsers render content.

1: Browser requests content from the website. A user wants to visit your site. Their browser requests content from your website, which includes the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that power your website.

2: Your web host sends files back to the browser. Your site’s files are sent back to the browser to be parsed and interpreted. Some files take longer to send than others—and some files take longer to interpret and display.

3: The browser renders the website. Eventually, every element of your website will be rendered, aka the code will be transformed into visuals. The user will finally arrive at your beautiful, functional website.

Google PageSpeed Insights can help you understand how your website is performing.

Large images

If an image file is too large, the user’s browser will take a long time to load it. Image optimization techniques like compression or reducing the size can help.

Tip: Compress large images to make them load faster without losing too much quality, and make sure the images are sized appropriately.

Bad hosting provider

A bad hosting provider may not have enough resources to handle your website’s traffic. Without the processing power, security measures, or server location to manage online visitors, you may notice slow load times.

Tip: Choose a reputable hosting provider with enough resources to handle your traffic.

Too many plug-ins or scripts

Plug-ins and scripts can add useful features to your website. However, each plug-in and script adds extra code that the browser has to load and process, which can make your website slower.

Tip: Only use the plug-ins and scripts that you really need to keep your load speed high.

Unoptimized code

A computer program can get the same result in multiple ways. For instance, 1+1=2 but so does 1+17-5-11. The first equation is a lot faster than the second equation.

Unoptimized code means that the computer must perform unnecessary or redundant tasks, which will slow down the load speed.

Tip: Hire a website designer to write optimized code that will perform only the necessary tasks in the most efficient manner.

Review and next steps

Slow load speed might be discouraging potential clients from reaching out to you. A slow-loading website can be caused by:

• Large images
• Bad hosting provider
• Too many plug-ins or scripts
• Unoptimized code

If your website is hindering and not helping, you may need a full website redesign—or you might just need a few tweaks.

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