Research shows that nearly half of web users always expect a website to load within two or three seconds or less. Furthermore, if a site doesn’t load within this time, users tend to leave the site sooner.
It sounds like a no big deal, but 78% of online shoppers experiencing such issues avoid using such sites to buy again, and 44% of shoppers never recommend their friends due to a poor experience.
Moreover, research shows that a one-second delay in web page load time reduces conversion rates by 7% along with the potential customers.
Today we’re here to discuss the factors affecting the loading speed of a website apparently, to save the decrease in the revenue.
Let’s get started and understand how hosting service and hosting provider acts as the most significant cause to affect your site speed, if not then why?
Web Hosting:
Website hosting is the main culprit that makes your site slow and sluggish. People go with a cheap host and web hosting solutions or plans at the beginning and then face the difficulties.
Every hosting service provider restricts your website in the shared server if resources are overused. Thus, you have to keep an eye on the traffic because as the daily page hits increase, it becomes important for you to move your site to a better quality server under affordable web hosting.
Also, don’t forget to analyze the other specs like bandwidth, frequency, and limits of hosting panels.
Also Read: Is VPS Hosting A Good Solution For Small Businesses?
HTTP Requests:
To call external resources like scripts, styles, etc. we make HTTP or HTTPS requests. As the number of requests increases, your loading time suffers.
Though you can combine multiple scripts and styles, getting assured for the site’s speed from the best hosting services can be a mistake. Another way of combining multiple images into one and calling all those separately using CSS sprites is a good way to boost your site speed.
However, always make sure that the combined file is less in size; otherwise, it will put a huge effect on website loading speed.
Average Coding:
Inadequate coding standards show a high impact on website loading speed. As a hosting provider, developer, designer, or the site owner, you must ensure that the theme of your site is well-coded.
The mediocre or average coding leads to slower loading time in addition to poor search engine performance. For example,
Almost, every website have Javascript files inside the <head></head> tags. And, those scripts block the HTML files from being rendered. In fact, increasing the loading speed.
If we move javascript or place them just above the body closing tag (</body>), it will not happen. Go to your website hosting services check with site speed testers and see the possible errors there.
Also Read: 5 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting traffic to your website
Absence of a CDN – Content Delivery Network:
CDN is one factor that always affects website loading speed. For example, let’s say if your website server is in India, then the visitors from America will find the site to load slower than those visiting it from India.
The importance of CDN can be understood here. A CDN has many data centers providing the best web hosting solutions all over the planet. If your site uses CDN, then it stores all the information locally in every data center of the world.
As a result, visitors see the content from a nearer location, but not from the original one.
File Size:
The size of files displayed on a webpage plays a significant role in the website’s loading speed. The higher the size, the slower the web page loads. To avoid this, the best practice is compressing any image before uploading it to your web servers.
In other words, to improve the loading speed, you can enable lazy loading for files and images. Hence, try to embed videos on your website after uploading them to sites like YouTube.
Also Read: How to setting up & generate more business from the website
No Caching:
Caching is a process to store files locally for fast retrieval in the future. Thus, if a browser has the cache of a website, it can’t make many HTTP or HTTPS requests to load it.
We use cache for the least modified contents like images, external scripts, styles, etc. where the expiration header always determines how long they should be locally available.
It is always a great idea to download the plugins and themes from trusted sources as they are malware-free and never creates a backdoor on your server.
Any business web hosting or corporate hosting keeps the possibility of cyber-attacks and try to prevent loads on your server; thus, keeping the website always a fast one.
If you find your site taking a longer time than the three seconds to load, then don’t panic and keep these points in your mind, follow the recommendations and keep testing test your speed.
“The sooner you make improvements, the better customers, traffic, and revenue you get.”
Conclusion
Your site speed is one of the important factors to generate high traffic, daily conversions, and revenue generation. Website hosting services play an important role in letting your website to load in less time. However, there are a few difficulties, challenges, and technical issues that affects your site speed. This article has given light to major 6 issues and solutions to counterfeit the slow loading speed.
Author Bio
Alisha is a content writer and director of operations. She writes for various industries like travel, wildlife, history, art, and of course technology! She works with B2B and B2C businesses providing digital marketing content that gains social media attention and increases their search engine visibility.