Having an online presence is essential for any small business trying to compete in today’s marketplace. One of the first things you need to do to establish this presence is invest in a quality website. Allowing professionals to help during the construction of your website can help you avoid major headaches along the way.
Once your website is live, your main goal should be keeping it fast and reliable. Nearly 79 percent of consumers claim they will avoid using a business if their website is slow to load or cumbersome to use.
With the help of website visitor monitoring, you can discover functionality issues and address them quickly. The biggest mistake most business owners make in regards to their website is setting and forgetting it. Just like any other tool at your disposal, a website will need to be updated and optimized as time goes by.
If you are trying to speed up your website, then check out these helpful tips to find out how to accomplish this goal.
Make Sure Your Images are Properly Optimized
As soon as your website starts to load slower, you need to troubleshoot this issue to figure out what is causing it. The first thing you need to look at when experiencing this issue are the images being used on the page. While having high-definition pictures is important for the appeal of your site, they may cause page load issues.
If you are unsure about what size your images need to be, then reaching out to a web development professional can be helpful. They will be able to look at the backend of your website to figure out the optimal size for your images.
Take an Objective Look at Your Plugins
One of the main reasons why WordPress sites are so popular with business owners is due to the vast array of plugins they have on the market. These plugins can be used for everything from creating image carousels to optimizing on-page SEO.
While these plugins can be quite useful, having too many of them can create lots of problems. This is why you need to purge your plugins on occasion. If your website starts to slow down significantly, it could be caused by conflicting plugins.
Getting to the root cause of this problem will be easy by disabling one plugin at a time. If there are a number of plugins you aren’t using, then delete them to avoid undue strain on your website. The time and effort invested in this plugin purge will be well worth it in the long run.
Your Loading Issues May Be Caused by a Bad Web Host
If you have tried everything under the sun to get your website loading issues resolved and have yet to find the root cause, you may want to consider changing web hosts. Some business owners fail to realize there are varying degrees of quality when it comes to web hosting. Simply settling on the cheapest option on the market can be problematic.
Before choosing a new web hosting provider, you will need to do a bit of research. Finding out how well a host has performed for other business owners can help you make this difficult decision with ease.
Letting slow page load speeds persist will usually lead to you losing lots of potential sales leads. Modern consumers have very little patience when it comes to slow loading websites. This is why you need to take fixing this problem seriously.
