4 Ways To Fix A Website Loading Slowly
Having a slow loading website can cause you many issues. As well as the obvious detrimental affect to user experience as it takes longer for them to see the information, it will also affect search engine rankings meaning less visitors will find your website.
Luckily, load times can be kept to a minimum with a few quick and easy steps. In this blog we will explain some of the ways you can increase the speed of your website.
Check resource-intensive plugins and addons
If you’re using a content management system such as WordPress for your website, there’s a high chance you’re also making the most of the many plugins available for the platform.
While these plugins can be very useful, there are a few drawbacks. It’s common for plugins to be unexpectedly resource-intensive, causing slow load times and 508 errors. Some plugins are also security vulnerabilities, giving hackers a way to access your account.
The simplest way to check which plugins are hogging resources is to disable all of the plugins one by one, checking how fast your website is loading afterwards. This will give you an indication of the plugin with the highest resource usage.
Some useful websites for page speed tests are Google PageSpeed Tools and Pingdom.
Use a caching plugin
When a caching plugin is used, portions of the website are stored in a cache, which means that accessing this information is much faster as those areas of the website have already been saved to the cache and don’t need to be downloaded again.
Using a caching plugin will therefore considerably increase the speed of your website, and if you’re on a CMS such as WordPress it’s quick and easy to install a caching plugin.
The most commonly used caching plugins for WordPress are WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache, which are highly configurable and widely used.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
If the website is on a server with a large geographical distance between the visitor’s machine, the website will load much slower than if the server was located in the same area as the visitor’s machine.
By this principal, a Content Delivery Network works by distributing your website across many servers globally, meaning the visitor will always load the website files from the server that’s geographically closest to them rather than the only available server.
Using a CDN such as Cloudflare can significantly speed up your website, and some hosting providers will provide this as part of a package.
Optimize Images
If you have large images on your website, the visitor’s browser is having to download more data meaning your website will end up loading more slowly.
There are several ways of optimizing images, but it’s recommended to first ensure that the images are only as big as they need to be, and that there’s no unnecessarily large images.
You can find many tools online that will optimize your images for you – tinypng.com is an example of a widely used and well known tool.
