4 Biggest Website Speed Offenders – and How to Fix Them

Internet speeds have never been faster, and expectations for how quickly websites should load have never been higher. More than half of mobile site visitors (53%) will leave a webpage that takes longer than three seconds to load, according to data from Google. With little room for error, publishers can’t afford to have any missteps. Slow page load times directly impact search engine optimization (SEO), as well as the user experience. It is generally easy to implement changes to improve page load times. The real challenge is that many publishers don’t realize they have a problem to begin with. The quickest way to determine whether you have an issue with slow website speed is to run a page speed test. Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom are all popular tools that publishers are using to test their homepages and landing pages. Using these tools, publishers can quickly gain insights into loading times and determine whether their pages are running slower than they should. Of course, diagnosing the issue is only half the battle. Once you’ve determined that your website is loading slowly, you need to figure out what’s causing the issue and learn how to fix it. While there are an endless number of issues that can slow down website speed, the vast majority of problems I see are caused by the same few issues. Here are the four biggest website speed offenders, along with suggestions on what you can do to fix them. Problem #1: Oversized Images Large, clear photos are pleasing to the eye. But oversized images also slow down websites, and that can create real headaches for publishers. When images aren’t sized appropriately, following the rules set by a web developer, browsers will shrink them down to the right size. That shrinking process usually doesn’t affect how the image looks to the eye, but it does add to the overall file size of the page and it can cause a website to load more slowly than it should. The fastest websites are those that run efficiently, and one of the keys to efficiency is for images to be sized appropriately. Solution: Serving Scaled Images & Optimizing Images If oversized images are causing your website to run slowly, then the next step is to decrease the size of your images. You might be wondering how you can decrease the size of an image without losing out on quality. The answer is by using a tool for lossless image compression. There are several tools that will auto compress images that are uploaded above a certain size. Two WordPress plugins that work well for this are Imsanity (Free) and WP Smush Pro (Premium Plugin). Some hosting providers also have proprietary tools that will auto compress images when they’re uploaded to the media library. It’s also a good idea to use a service like Amazon Web Services s3 (AWS s3). This is a reasonably priced tool offered by AWS where you can offload your images and website backups to serve from their servers and limit your worries about web host disk space. You can connect your site to AWS s3 after setting up an account by using the WP Offload Media plugin. The second piece of this solution is to serve scaled images. A scaled image is one that’s been adjusted to match the size dimensions of images required for a certain website. Serving scaled images means adjusting images to the correct size before they’re sent to the browser. That decreases the load on the browser, and speeds up the website. The best way to serve scaled images is to have your website developer set appropriate image and thumbnail sizes in your content management system (CMS). For example, when you add an image to a post, it may be uploaded at 1000x500, but around the website it may display at 800x400 or in thumbnail as 200x200. If the proper rules are set in a CMS such as WordPress, then the image will save in all the sizes used on your website. When the image is called, the website will know to serve the image file that has been scaled for the appropriate display. Bonus Tip: Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver images and static content to offload resources and speed up your site even further. Also see: Problem #3 Problem #2: Too Many HTTP Requests When I look at the backend of some publishers’ websites, I see way too many JavaScript, CSS, and image calls. The more of these file calls you have, the more HTTP requests you have. With browsers performing multiple requests to load each of these files, page load speeds can quickly drop. Solution: Optimize & Minify Reducing the number of CSS and Javascript files is the fastest way to drop the number of HTTP requests. How do you do that without losing valuable content? The easiest solution is to minify the code. Minification refers to removing unnecessary characters from the source code or markup languages without changing the functionality. A number of WordPress plugins have been developed for just this purpose; the one we use and see the most success with is WP Rocket. Problem #3: Improper Caching Improper caching is a frequent cause of slow website speeds. Caching is a technique that involves storing static copies of certain website files to quickly load, so users aren’t having to completely reload the website each time they hit “refresh.” Unfortunately, caching techniques can be tricky, and implementing a caching system isn’t something that most publishers can do on their own. Solution: Caching Tools A number of plugins are available to help WordPress publishers quickly implement caching on their websites. The plugin we recommend most frequently at Web Publisher PRO is WP Rocket. WP Rocket requires little configuration, and it can reduce the weight of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files through minification. It also has an easy way to clear your website cache when needed. Additional tools to use are a CDN, such as Cloudflare, or a good web host with a proprietary cache server. Problem #4: Hosting Issues If you’ve fixed the issues listed above and you’re still dealing with slow page load speeds, then your host might be to blame. Although it doesn’t come up as frequently as image optimization or caching, hosting issues can be related to slow page load speeds. If you are taking advantage of shared hosting, then your website is particularly susceptible to slow processing speeds during times when unrelated websites are experiencing a surge in traffic. You may also find that your website falls victim to malware injections and hacking while on a Shared Hosting Environment. Solution: Upgraded Hosting Plans Upgraded hosting can have a major impact on resource-intensive websites, like digital magazines and other online publishing websites. If your webpages are loading slowly during peak traffic periods, then it’s worth considering whether you need to upgrade your hosting plan. Working directly with a premium provider like AWS, Google Cloud, WP Engine, Pagely, or Web Publisher PRO will have a significant impact on your website performance. Take a close look at these potential problems, and you’ll probably pinpoint what’s causing your website’s slow page load times. If you have any additional questions about the biggest website speed offenders, or how to optimize your website for mobile users, please feel free to contact me and we can chat about your situation.

Search Engine Optimization

4 Biggest Website Speed Offenders – and How to Fix Them

David Walsh

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

David Walsh