Slow Website Tricks You Need to Know Now

One of the most frustrating things for site owners and visitors is a slow running website. It provides the visitors with a very poor user experience, and for the owner of the site, can be cause of a lot of headaches and stress.

Page load and site speed is an extremely important factor for how your website ranks in the search engines such as Google and Bing, and there are lots of factors that cause a website to load slowly.

Google places a lot of importance on the user experience of a site’s visitor, as well as lots of other factors, and slow loading sites are certain to give a poor experience. In such cases, Google will rank other, faster websites in front of yours.

In this article we will take a look at some of the most common causes of slow site speed, and how you can work out what could be causing your site to be so slow.

Determining the Causes

If your website is slow, the first thing you need to do is to try and work out what is causing it to be so slow. There are a number of tools that you can find online which can help you with this. One such tool is GTMetrix.com, which will perform a test of your URL and score it. It will also provide you with a clear breakdown of any problems that your website has, and suggestions on how to fix them.

Another useful tool is Google’s PageSpeed insights, which will also run a test on your URL and provide you with results of the test, and show you where your site has problems. If you are a user of the Chrome browser, you should download the Google Lighthouse extension, which lets you run comprehensive tests of your sites directly from the browser. It’s a very powerful tool and one used by a lot of developers and SEOs.

Any of the above methods of testing should show you where your main problems lie when it comes to loading times of your website. The next step is following their suggestions and try to increase the page speed.

Are you using WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular CMS (content management system) in the world, and powers over 30% of all websites on the internet. It is a platform used by all types of web developers, from beginners to professionals, and is an extremely powerful system, capable of making all types of websites. There are lots of web hosts that offer specialized hosting accounts for WordPress, with some of them being featured over on the Fortune Lords website.

One very important part of WordPress are the plugins that you can download and install to add a variety of functionality to your website. There are plugins for everything from simple social media buttons, contact forms and galleries, to full blown e-commerce solutions, such as WooCommerce, which is one of the most widely used ecommerce plugins in the world.

Too many plugins

The use of too many plugins can cause your websites to load slowly, so it’s a good idea to check which plugins you are using. In fact, it is important to check which plugins you have actually downloaded to your site, and whether or not you have even activated them. Firstly, if you have any deactivated plugins, then you should delete them completely. You can also reinstall them when needed.

Next you need to look through the plugins that you have installed and are using, and decide whether or not they are really vital. Just uninstalling a single plugin can have a dramatic effect on your page speed, so one thing you can do is to determine which plugins you can live without, and then deactivate one of them.

Then, go to GTMetrix or PageSpeed Insights and run the tests again and compare the results to your previous tests. Has the loading times improved? Keep track of how the speeds are with each different plugin you deactivate, and then you can work out which ones are causing the long loading times for your site.

Server issues

In addition to your website speed being purely based on your website, there are also lots of reasons why the issue could be related to your hosting and the server being used.

If you are on shared hosting, where you are sharing the resources of the server with hundreds or even thousands of other users, then this could easily be the root of the problem. Sometimes there might be someone running a script on their website which is causing the problems and using much more resources than they have been allocated.

Usually the web host should notice this and take the appropriate action, but in some cases, especially with cheap $1 a month hosting, this might not be of the greatest concern to the host.

Your website is exceeding your hosting account

Issues may also be caused by the hosting package that you are using. If your website traffic has grown over the last few years, then it may be that the resources and limits of your current hosting package are no longer sufficient for your website, and you will need to upgrade your account.

Many hosts place a limit of things such as CPU, RAM as well as disc space and data transfer, so if you have noticed that your site has recently started to be a lot slower than it once was, this could be the reasons.  If you are using for your server for games, then you might want to check out a dedicated gaming server.

In such a case, it’s important that you speak to your host, and ask them if your account needs to be upgraded, or if the issues you are experiencing lie elsewhere.

Has your website been hacked?

If your website has been hacked, then this could also lead to performance issues. There are many different types of hacks that can be experienced by a website, with one being page injection. This is basically where the hacker has configured your website to create hundreds or thousands of spammy pages.

If you are using a CMS such as WordPress, then there are a number of different plugins that you can install that can help protect against such things. If you believe your website has been hacked, then you need to contact the host right away and ask them to take a look.

Closing words

Page speed is important, and if your website takes a long time to load, it’s most likely that visitors are leaving your website before the page has loaded. If you are operating a business website, then this could potentially lead to losing clients and income.

Most websites can have their page speeds increased by following some of the guidance mentioned in this article. If all else fails, then it would be a good time to get in contact with a page speed specialist, who will be in the best position to offer you guidance and a solution to your problem.