Slow Website? Here’s How To Fix It

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There are many factors that can make or break a website. Nowadays, website speed is a vital factor, especially if you are running an eCommerce site. People can choose when and where to obtain the information, and they expect to get it within split seconds. And if your website dealing with modern consumers, it would cause them pain if it’s slow loading — which eventually affects your cost. Here’s why slow websites can cost damage to you and your customer experience:

The Results of Slow Website and How To Fix It

Poor User Experience

UX is key when it comes to selling your products online. If customers do not understand how your website work plus it’s taking forever to load, it will definitely frustrate them. And you can be sure they most likely will not come back again.

frustrated-user

How to fix it: There are simple ways to solve this. But it also requires quite some work before you can get it done. If you are using WordPress hosting, it can implement browser and server-side caching to store frequently used data (NGINX Caching). This means data can be retrieved much faster and result in loading speed improvement.

Affects your SEO ranking

SEO means almost everything when you are running a business online. It helps your customers to find you and make a purchase. But did you know that having a slow website can take a hit to your SEO rankings? Over the years, Google has given precedence to faster loading websites compared to others. So, why let such a thing affect your ranking and lose your customers?

How to fix it: An effective way is to optimize all the images you have on your website. You can use free tools such as TinyPNG to reduce the size of images without compromising the quality.  Also, remember that JPEG images file size is smaller than PNGs and GIFS!

Damage your brand’s image

How would you perceive Exabytes, if a web hosting solution website has a slow loading website? A website reflects as much as your brand and how you want people to perceive it. And don’t forget the influence from word of mouth. If you own a professional website, don’t let it go off to be associated with amateur practices.

word-mouth

How to fix it: Time to do some cleaning! Start by reducing the amount of CSS, JavaScript and even your image files. Sometimes, the most simple and modern website is the most visually pleasing. Moreover, it boosts the speed as your user will only need to download much lesser files.

Miss out on potential customers

There are generally 2 different types of consumers online today: 1) They know what they need to buy and search for the best seller they can afford, and 2) They are open to suggestions and recommendations based on their interest. Nevertheless, these consumers have a short attention span. And either way, they are looking to browse seamlessly and safely. Websites have a limited window of time and opportunity to convert these consumers into a buyer. But, if your website takes ages to load, that’s a lot of potential customers lost.

How to fix it: Clean up your website’s code can help to increase the speed. There are many unnecessary elements that you may have overlooked such as white space, inline spacing etc. If you are a current WordPress user, you can get helpful extensions on Plesk to help you analyze your website content before boosting your performance, such as Google Pagespeed Insights or Speed Kit.

Fast Website = Happy Customers

These are some of the ways how a slow website can affect your brand and revenue. However, as you keep these practices in mind, you will see a noticeable improvement in customer satisfaction which leads to an increase in sales.