Common Reasons for Sluggish Website Loading Time
Slow website loading time is a bummer. If you’ve stumbled on a site whose pages tend to take several tens of seconds before loading completely, you probably got frustrated before you even found what you were looking for. That’s what your potential audience feel if your website loads too slowly. Any of the following could cause slow loading time.
It’s probably your server
Think of your website like a car. Then the server is like its engine. When someone clicks a link to your site, they’re like starting the engine. If the engine is bad, the car isn’t going to run fine.
Poor server performance is usually a web hosting concern. Cheap web host is commonly the culprit. That cheap hosting service means you’re sharing a server with other websites, thus slowing down your site’s loading time.
Server location can also be a culprit. The longer the distance between your audience and the server, the longer the loading time. So if you have an American website but your server is in India, for some reason, expect a sluggish website because the data has to travel across the globe.
Huge amount of traffic is coming in
It’s not just the amount of traffic per se but also the capacity of your web server. Imagine a two-lane street. If only a few cars pass by, traffic is smooth. But when a multitude of cars passes by, traffic can slow down. Multi-lane highways have greater traffic capacity. They get congested, sure, but not as fast as two-lane roads. The same thing is true for servers. Some servers can handle a surge of visitors than other servers. Nevertheless, even the best and fastest servers can fail during extraordinary situations.
You got large files on your web page
Large images are like heavy items that your server has to carry to your audience’s computer. Back in the day, it would take minutes for huge images to load. Those were the dial-up days. Internet is much faster today, but still large files on your website will hog resources. Files in TIFF and BMP formats may well be avoided unless you have a powerful server. Otherwise, even your JPG or PNG files may need to be resized.
Your website has excess coding
The greater your website’s code density, the slower it will load up. CSS, HTML, and Javascript make up a colossal pile of code. Maybe the problem is your server. Or perhaps you have excess coding that your web developer needs to prune.
In many cases, you can’t just let go of the stuff that makes your site what it is. Graphics may lengthen loading times, but they may be fitting to the kind of business that you have. Maybe you can remove some of the plugins. Maybe not.
On the other hand, an outdated CMS can also bog down your site. There could be other reasons. But what’s important is you inspect your site when your followers or subscribers tell you it’s slow to load. You may need to contact your web host or web developer.
