There is nothing more frustrating than a website the runs slowly. In today’s hyper-connected world, people won’t wait more than a few seconds for a website page to load before clicking the back button.

This is why it’s crucial for your business that you keep your website running as fast as possible. To help you achieve this, here are four factors that can cause a website slowdown.

1) Your Web Host

If you are on a shared server with other websites, that means that you’re sharing the server load. At some stage, other sites might be getting more traffic than yours, which causes the server bandwidth to be used up. That means that your website is getting served to your visitors slower because there is not as much capacity.

One solution to this is to look at a virtual private server. Although this can be a little more expensive, it can help your website to run faster.

2) Large Images

It might seem today that because we high-resolution screens that the larger the image size, the better it is for your site visitors. However, when loading larger images from a server, it can slow down your website.

When you have images posted on your website, aim to keep them at a maximum size of 400KB. That is the ideal image size for both a cell phone or a webpage.

3) Code, plugins or themes

On the backend of every website is a lot of code that tells the server exactly what to display to your website visitors. Over time, the code can become more complex, especially if you’ve had different developers working on your site. So it makes sense from time to time to have a code audit to ensure that the code is running efficiently.

You can also look at themes and plugins which can get out of date, to check that they are efficient and working to the optimum capacity.

4) Ads or Spam Comments

While it might be tempting to have ads on your blog or website, they can slow down the performance. Think about whether it’s worth the revenue to have those ads, or whether it might be better to have a clean website that sells your products and services directly.

Also, if you have comments activated on your blog, you might notice that over time you begin to get spam comments. From time to time it’s a good idea to clean up all the spam comments to make sure that things are running smoothly.

These four factors are some of the main causes of a website slowing down over time. As newer code and more advanced websites develop, it is normal to need to do some upgrades. Invest some time and effort into keeping your site running fast, and you will ensure your customers keep visiting and buying from you.

If you need help uncovering the causes of your website being slow, then you can reach out to us for help. Brandastic is a Web Development agency based in Orange County Calfornia. We can help you to get the most from your current website build or look at improving it for the future.