In our modern world, website speed is important for many different reasons. It has been said that if a site takes longer than three seconds to load many would-be visitors would look elsewhere for information or even services. This is crucial because if a potential customer leaves your page and finds your goods or services from another site your business will lose money. Website speed can also directly affect other aspects of the company’s business operations. A slow website can also impact search ranking which will also affect how much traffic the site will receive. The less traffic your website gets, the less chance you will have to sell your services to new customers.

But website speed doesn’t just matter to potential new customers—it is important for your current customers as well. The overall performance of a business will help dictate the customers the business retains. Website speed and overall performance help retain users. There is a direct correlation between increased or decreased traffic from users to the speed of a website. The image sharing and social media service, Pinterest, reduced perceived wait times by 40% which increased its search engine traffic and sign-ups by 15%. The direct opposite of this is also true. The news site, BBC, discovered that its site lost an extra 10% of users every additional second its site took to load.

We live in a fast-paced society that encourages instant gratification. People are less patient today especially when it comes to digital media. This is why the speed of your website is crucial to the success of your business.

What Are Some Reasons Websites Load Slower?

We know that the speed of your website is vital to your business, but why is your website running slower? There are several reasons some websites are slow. The first one is unoptimized images and content. A site that has a sizeable amount of unoptimized images can cause your website to slow down. High-resolution images can make a website look professional and legitimate, but it can use a lot of bandwidth as it loads. Using larger images that are uncompressed can increase the size of the website. This can cause your site to load slower than usual.

Another reason for a slower website could be the use of too much flash content. Again, this is one of the things that make a website look great. It can also add some useful interactive sections to the website but using too much flash content will bring down the speed of a website.

A website that has too many advertisements can also slow downloading speeds. Advertisements are a good way to monetize the traffic on your website. If your company’s site is frequently visited, your company can earn some extra revenue for displaying a couple of advertisements from other companies. But too many advertisements can lead to a slow site. Making some extra money may take away from your business. Avoid this by limiting the advertisements on your site.

JavaScript issues can also be one of the causes of a slow website. JavaScript plugins have made it simpler and more convenient to add content to a website, but if the JavaScript is applied inadequately it could also cause the speed of your website to decrease significantly.

Coding is important for the way a website looks and is also essential for how users interact with it. But bad, unclean coding can also directly affect the speed of a website. Just as uncompressed images, unnecessary white space, blank lines, and redundant comments can needlessly make a website larger than it needs to be. This will also cause the site to load slower.

How to Improve the Speed of Your Website?

As you now know, there are numerous reasons why a website may be loading and running slower than normal, but there are ways to improve the speed of your website. Unoptimized and unformatted images can be problematic, but there are some easy fixes for this. Check the size of your images. Try to have all the images on the site smaller than 1MB. Using an image resizer and image compression will benefit your website.

As mentioned earlier, too much Flash content will bog down the speed of your site. Limiting the number of Flash files or even removing them completely will improve your site. HTML5 can be a good replacement for some of your interactive content.

Unclean coding can also be fixed with some revisiting and revising of some excessive elements. Be careful and cognizant of all the coding that makes up your website. All of it matters.

You should also take advantage of caching techniques. A cache is a high-speed data storage layer that stores a subset of data. This makes future requests quicker by retrieving the data’s primary storage location.

How a Dedicated Server Can Improve Website Speeds

Another way to improve the speed of your website is by investing in a dedicated server. Using a shared server often means you are also sharing an IP address. If one of the other websites that share your IP address gets blacklisted for some reason, your website can also be negatively impacted. Having your dedicated server and dedicated IP address can prevent this occurrence.

A dedicated server can also increase security. Because no one else has access to your dedicated server you alone have access. You will have ultimate control of the firewall settings. This will increase your site’s security and increase your website’s performance. Your company can also take advantage of additional physical security by having your dedicated server with a trusted colocation provider in a state-of-the-art data center location. A dedicated server has many additional benefits.

Conclusion

Website speed is one of the most vital aspects of business today. Many companies rely on digital communication to bring their goods and services to the people. A website’s speed can directly affect how much new business will be coming in. Follow these steps to improve the speed of your website. And if you’re looking for a dedicated server—connect with Colocation America today.