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Wondering why your sales aren’t going up? Your website speed could be the reason why. Today, a lot of website owners spend most of their time working on the content and graphics of their websites but forget about optimizing the page load speed. The website speed is a very important aspect of any site. It is a primary determinant as to whether visitors will continue viewing your site or they will just leave in a second. Well, if you are tired of having a slow website, you are in the right place. Below, we will discuss the disadvantages of slow websites, the causes and how you can remedy this situation.

The Cons of a Slow Website

Before we dive into the causes of a slow website speed and how to correct that, let’s start with the cons of having a slow website. As a matter of fact, having a slow website is entirely disadvantageous. There are no pros associated with it.

When browsing, have you ever come across a site that took forever to load, and you just stared at the screen with frustration? This is the feeling that visitors have when they visit your page. This is a situation that you don’t want your visitors to ever be in. if your website speed is too slow, then it’s costing you in the following ways.

1. It Increases Your Site’s Bounce Rates

Bounce rates are an excellent way for you to judge whether your site is pleasant to your audience or not. Having a slow website increases your bounce rates because clients usually get too annoyed by the slow speed and end up leaving the site before making the purchase. One thing that you need to know is that in the online world, people lack the virtue of patience.

2. It Interferes with Your Site’s Ranking

Never knew that site speed affects your Google rankings? Well, you should. In 2010, Google announced that site speed will be used in the ranking of websites. This, therefore, shows that no matter how much effort you put in other forms of SEO, ignoring your website speed will always pull you down on search engine result pages.

2. You Can Forget about Making Profits

A slow website speed will cut your conversion rates into half. As a result, you can forget about making profits at all. It’s because people will always abandon your site, midway of a purchase. And Google won’t be able to rank you higher, thus you will be gaining minimal traffic.

Why is My Website Slow and How Can I Increase the Page Load Speed?

As you can see above, a slow website speed can be very costly. You should, therefore, take action as soon as possible. The ideal speed of a website should be in between 2 to 3 seconds. Making your website load at 1 second is even much better. There are a couple of things that can cause a website to be slow. Below are factors that may be making your site speed to be slow and ways on how you can rectify that problem.

1. The Data Center Location

Most website owners usually think that data center location doesn’t matter when it comes to the site speed, but it does. The location of your server will affect how quickly your site loads. The further your web users are from the actual server, then the longer it will take for the site to load on their ends. You, therefore, need to be aware of your website data center location and if it’s close to all of your target audience. The ideal way for you to rectify this problem is by selecting a web host that has their servers in data centers located strategically all over the world. Having such will give you peace of mind knowing your target audience wherever they are, they can speedily access your site.

2. You Have Big Files

Big files uploaded on a website can make the site’s speed slow. It’s because large files will always take longer to load. As much as you want to make the appearance of your site appealing by use of quality graphic content, you need to be mindful of the size. Always take time to resize these images or any other file. You can also compress these files. You can use GZIP to compress files on your site.

3. You Have Too Many Server Calls

Server Calls also known as HTTP Requests also play a big role in your site’s speed. For every single file that you request, will always send a call to the server. The more the requests the more times the server has to be called and thus slowing down your page speed. To fix this, you will have to reduce redirects and fix any broken links. Moreover, you can also use CSS image sprites. These CSS image sprites will represent a number of files/images that will send only one call to the server thus increasing the page loading speed comparing requesting a single file per server call.

4. Latency

Latency refers to the period taken for your server to respond to an HTTP request. A site can be slowed down due to latency. If the period taken is long for your server to respond to the request then your website speed will be relatively slow. Latency is a result of the physical distance between the content provider and the end user. The best way for you to tackle latency is by use of Content Delivery Networks which decrease latency by cache copying your content at various places on the world.

5. Unwanted Plugins

At times, too many plugins can prove to be quite disadvantageous. For instance, if you are using WordPress, then you probably have got a couple of plugins. Remember, each plugin makes its own file request. The more they are, the more requests there will be and the slower your site will be.

6. Your Web Host Provider isn’t Fast Enough

At the bottom of the list of things that are slowing down your website is your web host provider. No matter how many adjustments you make to your site, if your web host provider is slow then so will your site speed be. The first foundation of having a fast website is by choosing a fast web host provider. Your web host provider will optimize your website speed and ensure its fast enough.

Having a slow site? The guidelines above will ensure that your website is as fast as possible. By now, you are definitely aware of the disadvantages of having a slow site. Nonetheless, as mentioned above, the speed of your site highly depends on your web host provider. www.GlowHost.com is a reputable and reliable web host provider. With GlowHost, you can say goodbye to slow websites. They feature multiple data center locations all over the world (16 to be exact), excellent network and their customer/technical support team is always available to hear and address your concerns at all times. Hosting with a web host company that has been in existence for a while, you can be assured of only getting the best services.