If you own a website, you must always have a proactive approach and continuously do your website analysis. You should never think that your website is the finished article or there are no more reasons for you to improve your website performance. The websites in 2022 are not the same as they were in 2022. Similarly, customer behavior changes with how your website interacts with them. If they realize that your website is taking too long to load, they will walk away from your platform without second thoughts.
Strategies to Improve Website Speed
1) Server Efficiency
Once an individual clicks on your website, it starts loading instantly. It is almost like when you turn the car key to turn on the car engine. When a person clicks on your website, your browser will send a ping to your server. It will request all the required information so your website can load properly. The lack of quality server performance can be one of the reasons why your website is slow. Regardless of how up-to-date everything else is, you must note that a slow server will always result in a slow website.
If your server performance is running slow, a poor web host could be one of the reasons behind it. A cost-effective website host will provide you with a shared server, which means you can share your resources with several other websites. One of the reasons why your website speed is not up to the mark is because it coincides with many other websites.
2) Server Location
If you have made a long-distance call before, you would understand how long it takes to connect. The reason is that the data or the information must travel physically to connect appropriately. The data goes through cables, and the transmission is conducted via satellites. When you click on a website, a similar trend follows. When an individual clicks on a website, a message is sent to the server. You instruct the server to load the website content.
For example, your server is located in the subcontinent and an American viewer has just clicked on your website, your data and information must go all the way from the Pacific. Once it has requested the server, it must make its way back across the ocean to be displayed on the screen, which results in the website running slow. Even though the data travels quickly, it isn’t something you see in fictional movies. Therefore, it results in a slow website, and a lot of improvement needs to be done.
3) High Website Traffic
When you own a website, it is one of your objectives to have high website traffic. However, having high website traffic doesn’t always result in good news for you. According to numerous studies worldwide, high website traffic results in the website running slow. Currently, your web server can only serve a specific number of individuals.
Image taken from Strikingly
It is almost like you are standing in line to complete your purchase at a departmental store. The more customers there are in the line, the slower they will be received. To overcome this problem, the store would need more people for assistance. The same thing applies to a website and its handling of the website traffic. On a website, your server will try to handle the entirety of the traffic, but it will result in a slow website. Strikingly provides its users with website analytics, which helps them check the number of visitors coming to their website landing page. Moreover, they will also be able to identify their behaviors, which makes them understand on which web page the customers are likely to be located.
4) Size of Images
Do you remember the days when you had dial-up connections for internet purposes? During those days, it was almost like you had to wait for a lifetime to ensure the website image got loaded. Even though the Internet has evolved since then, the fundamental rules still apply to the images. If you want to fix slow websites, you must check out the images that are uploaded. As we have said before, a ping to the server will result in the entire content of your webpage being transferred to the browser screen.
The server will specifically host the images, GIFs, and videos. If you have a large image, it will take a longer time to upload. If you have numerous photographs uploaded on your website, all of them will take time individually to load properly. However, it is important that you have a specific image format. If we talk about the most common browsers used, JPEG and PNG are the most preferred image formats. If you go with BMP and TIFF, it will take a lot of loading time.
5) Content Delivery Network
Content management is a huge part of your website planning. If you learn content management, you must understand content delivery networks (CDN). This network consists of numerous servers that are strategically distributed across the country. You can create clones or copies of your website so that individuals that are extremely distant from your main server can load its pages quickly. Strikingly provides you with the feature of creating a clone of your website.
However, if you have a WordPress website, you can look for alternatives, such as Cloudflare. If you want to know how to fix a slow website, you must always make it easy for your customers to load your web pages. For example, if you consider the Jetpack CDN, it will be preferable for images and videos.
6) JavaScript Render-Blocking
Even though the world is talking about Javascript in terms of IT web and application development, all is not well when it comes to this platform. Apparently, Javascript could be one of the reasons why your website is slow. Javascript is fundamental in allowing users to interact with your website. However, if your website doesn’t have this feature, it will result in a dull experience of your website. Your web pages will load slowly in customers’ browsers, resulting in a slow website.
When a browser loads a website, it must adequately upload all of the displayed Javascript files. To cope with the slow speed of your website through Javascript, you must consider the following options:
- Removal of external Javascript files and replacing them with inline Javascript files, which increases page speed
- Consider asynchronous loading to make sure that the Javascript files load independently for the rest of the webpage
- Hold off on loading Javascript until the rest of the page gets loaded successfully
7) Inefficient CSS
CSS is defined as the code required to represent your web pages. If you want to fix slow websites, you must make sure that they are optimized, just like was the case with Javascript. There are a few techniques that you can use to increase your website speed, such as:
- Create a combination of multiple CSS files into one
- Removal of external CSS files and replace them with inline CSS files
Create a Website on Strikingly
If you want to create a fully-functional website that has a high loading speed, you must consider Strikingly without any question. Strikingly is a free website builder that allows you to develop the website of your dreams with just a few clicks. If you have doubts about the potential slow websites on Strikingly, you can check out the Google pagespeed insight score of all our established websites. Considering all the established Strikingly websites, they have an average pagespeed insight score of 90 or more.
Once you complete the registration on Strikingly, you will fall into the free plan user’s column.
You will be able to create an essential website regarding your specified niche with no occurrences of slow page loading. Strikingly provides you with a domain worth $24.95, which may change as per the domain name (website name) and the domain extension you prefer. For example, if you are creating a foundation website, you may consider the domain extension of .org.
Conclusion
Regardless of your business niche, you want your website to perform efficiently. Your website can only serve to the best of its ability if it doesn’t experience a slow page loading. If you have a slow website, you must make sure that you conduct an in-depth analysis of your platform from back to front to identify any potential deficiencies. Once you have identified those weaknesses, you must prioritize and remove them one by one.
If you want to relieve yourself of all these problems, you must create a website on Strikingly and fulfill your business objectives. Once you have completed your website, you will focus just on your business niche as Strikingly will cover all the technical side of things related to your website. By relying on a quality website builder like Strikingly, you can create an efficient website that will bring traffic to your platform.
