Having a fast-loading website is an invaluable resource. If a website takes longer than 3 seconds, most users will move on to a different site, which means making sure your website loads quickly is an incredibly important part of maintaining your site. However, trying to decipher why your website has suddenly slowed can be incredibly difficult. With so many different factors involved, it can be tough to know where to start your search! If you’re trying to figure out why your site has suddenly slowed down, take a look at our blog to learn about a few of the most common reasons that your site has begun to slow down.
Caching Issues
Once you’ve loaded a web page once, your browser saves a static copy of the page to make it faster to load the page in future sessions. However, caching can sometimes cause issues while trying to load your site! To ensure that your site is always running at it’s most updated, install a caching plug-in that allows you to quickly cache your entire site, ensuring that new users receive the most updated experience, but also that all of the essential elements on your site stay loaded in their browser.
Check Your Plug-Ins
Another thing that can quickly down your site is installing too many unnecessary plug-ins. One way to figure out whether a particular plug-in is slowing down your site’s speed is by running a test such as Google Pagespeed Insights, both before and after disabling a plug-in and see how the site’s speed responds. If you find that a particular plug-in is significantly slowing down your site speed, disable it and try to find a suitable alternative.
Reduce Image Sizes & Optimize Images
One of the quickest ways to slow down your site is by uploading too many unoptimized images. If you have images on your site that are unnecessarily large, you can reduce their size and optimize them by installing plug-ins on WordPress. There are a variety of plug-ins that can reduce and optimize images, including Tiny PNG, so search around in WordPress for a plug-in that meets your needs!
Minimize The Code On Your Site
Another thing that can quickly slow your site speed down is having too-much unoptimized code. Unless you’ve been coding for years, you’re likely to have additional lines of code on your site that reduce the speed of your site. There are plug-ins that can be installed on WordPress that will reduce the code on your site, eliminating unnecessary line breaks and spaces, optimizing your code and speeding up the site’s loading speeds. Minify the CSS & Javascript on your site to reduce the amount of time it takes to load.
Contact Us Today
If you’re interested in learning more about how to increase the speed of your site, our team at Boston Web Marketing is ready to assist! We can be reached over the phone at (857) 526-0096 or by filling out our team’s online contact form! We look forward to hearing from you and assisting with your site speed optimization!