Why Is My Website Loading Slowly? Website Speed Explainer
Some of us are old enough to remember the days of dial-up modems and seemingly endless buffering for 20-second video lengths. But as Wi-Fi has evolved and connectivity has become more accessible, most browsers have a much smoother experience. However, sometimes website speed has more to do with the site and its hosting than the internet connection.
If you find your Squarespace or WordPress website slow or functioning poorly, there are several potential causes. You only have a few seconds before a potential customer might go somewhere else, so it’s important to ascertain these causes as quickly as you can. This article will explore the different bottlenecks that can drive inefficiencies, so you can ensure every platform setup and SEO website migration doesn’t go to waste.
‘Heavy assets’ are often responsible for slow-loading websites
If you’re getting reports of website speed lacking, it could be an issue that you’re using ‘heavy assets’. This means the high-resolution images and videos on your site are weighing your page down.
Some of the most common culprits that can make a website very slow to load include:
- Unoptimised images, such as photographs and JPEGs straight from the camera, instead of compressed WebP or AVIF files (5MB vs <200KB).
- Lack of ‘lazy loading’, which means images and videos are downloaded automatically, rather than appearing as the user scrolls down to them.
- Video files being hosted directly on your server rather with integrated streamers, such as YouTube or Vimeo, will significantly slow a page down.
Make sure that your assets are optimised to lighten the load.
‘Shadow’ third-party scripts can drag down website speed
It’s important to use analytics scripts for marketing purposes, but every extra script is going to connect with a server and slow down your website.
- Tracking pixels firing from multiple platforms at once will slow down your site.
- Chat Widgets can slow a page down, rendering first before the rest of the page.
- Using four or five different fonts from Google Fonts across can add time to the rendering process (not to mention being unnecessary for your branding).
These kinds of external scripts can stack up quickly and kill your performance.
Inadequate hosting & high TTFB
Having the wrong hosting can slow down the Time to First Byte (TTFB), meaning the measurement of how long it takes for the first ‘crumb’ of data to come through.
Some hosting facets that can nuke a website page speed test include:
- Physical distance from server to customer can cause latency and slow things down, but a Content Delivery Network can eliminate this.
- Shared hosting can slow you down, as another website having a traffic spike will slow yours down.
Make sure you put your hosting trust in a reliable, reputable company that will offer you dedicated attention and CDN services.
Render-blocking resources can slow down your site
Specific pieces of code can get in the way of general rendering, making for a much slower customer experience.
- Top-loading your page with JavaScript at the <head> of the HTML will require downloading and execution, offering white screens.
- Bloated all-in-one CSS frameworks will slow things down, especially as you’re only going to use around 5% of the styles.
But even if you know all of these things, how do you bring website speed back up to scratch?
- Compress your images and videos down
- Delete plugins and scripts you no longer use
- Ensure your caching layer is active to serve static versions of the page
- Using Content Delivery Networks to keep content ‘closer’ to the visitor
With these guidelines, you should be able to keep your website speedy and functional, minimising bounce and maximising the efficacy of your materials.
