Did you know that a 1-second delay in your website's load time may lead to a whopping 7% drop in conversions?
The performance of your website plays a major role in helping you attract quality leads and score more sales.
It has a direct impact on your ability to generate revenue and the growth of your business in the long run. Therefore, you should strive to offer a seamless experience to people who visit your website.
To do that, you must identify the things that may cause problems for you and affect your website's performance.
Only then will you be able to come up with viable solutions to the problem and ensure that your website stands out from other competing brands.
Here are a few things that may affect your website's performance:
1. Heavy Files
One of the things that drastically affects the performance of your website is the use of heavy files, such as images.
They have a significant impact on the user experience, as your pages may take forever to load for visitors.
Therefore, it's important that you always consider optimizing your images. The key here is to find the right balance between image quality and file size.
You can make the required changes via script or with the use of a variety of optimization tools. Plus, you should avoid using busy images and use simple ones that get the job done.
The goal here is to offer a seamless experience to your visitors and make your pages load in an instant for them. Around 47% of visitors expect websites to load within 2 seconds. So, to meet their expectations, it's best that you avoid using heavy files for your pages.
2. Subpar Hosting Service
Poor hosting service has a tremendous impact on your website's performance. Online businesses often make poor choices when it comes to selecting a hosting service, especially those that have just gotten started.
Since small businesses have to make do with limited funds, they settle for a subpar hosting service that may not cause a major dent in the wallet.
While this may seem like a wise strategy, it often backfires in the long run. A poor hosting service or a shared hosting plan may cause performance issues for your site.
When you choose an unreliable hosting service, there's more load on the servers than they can handle. And that may significantly affect the performance of your site.
3. Poor Navigation Experience
People visit your website to explore relevant information and find answers to their questions. Therefore, it's important that you facilitate their access to the content published on your site.
Your content hierarchy not only helps you retain your visitors and keeps them coming back for more, but it also helps improve your SEO.
The purpose of creating a website is to generate traction and engage the intended target audience.
Poor navigation leads to a bad user experience, which in turn has an impact on how your website performs and the results you get from it.
4. Unclean Code
The code of your website may also have a significant impact on the way it performs. There may be a number of things that may cause your website's code to bulk up.
When the code is poorly written or optimized, it may cause your website to be heavy and have a significant impact on its performance.
To avoid this from happening, you should always check your code for things that may cause it to bulk up and clean it to offer a better experience to your visitors.
5. Caching Issues
Not enabling caching on your website may lead to performance issues and a poor user experience.
Caching is a process where web applications store important data in memory for easy access the next time someone visits the site.
This causes the websites to load quickly and provides users with speedy access to the required information.
Caching also has a considerable impact on your search engine visibility and increases the likelihood of you capturing quality leads for the sales funnel.
6. Excessive HTTP Requests
HTTP requests are used by every site to load successfully for the respective visitors. A website sends these requests to hosting servers to display relevant information. However, when these requests are excessive, it may cause your website to perform poorly.
Generally, a website sends excessive HTTP requests due to heavy use of media, large files, JavaScript issues, and so on.
As a result, when a visitor tries to view a particular page, it may take ages to load, as the browser has to send several HTTP requests to fetch the needed information.
The key to solving this issue is to avoid publishing busy pages on your website and keep them as simple as you can for your visitors.
7. Lack of a CDN
CDN, also known as a content delivery network, represents a network of servers in different locations.
Your website may be accessed by visitors around the globe. The purpose of having a CDN is to ensure that all your visitors have a seamless experience, irrespective of their geographic location.
The experience acknowledged by people visiting your site who are far away from the main server may be drastically different from the ones who live nearby.
A content delivery network helps you overcome this issue, as your website performance stays unaffected by the visitors' location. This means zero load time issues or a clunky user experience for your visitors around the globe.
Final Words
There you have it: the seven things that affect your website's performance. If you wish to grow your business online, it's important that you offer a seamless experience to your visitors through your site.
To make it happen, your website should operate at optimal efficiency and facilitate hitch-free access to relevant information. This will help you engage the intended audience and generate leads to fuel your revenue.
So, if you've been facing website performance issues lately, the recommendations provided may come in handy.
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