Are you not getting the profits you think your site should be getting despite the high quality of your products and service? Are you seeing a high bounce rate in your site’s analytics despite having great looking pages and amazing products? If you are experiencing these things, maybe the culprit is not your product or your service, but how fast your site runs.

It has been found that slow loading sites tend to see a high bounce rate and this is because people do not want to wait around for a page to load. If your niche is highly competitive, having a slow loading page and a website that is sluggish can spell your site’s demise. When you have an online portal, you need to make sure that your pages are giving your clients what they need in a timely manner.

You have to remember that a slow loading time affects your site’s bottom line. If your site does not load its pages in a few seconds after the links are clicked, you can expect a high bounce rate. If a page takes more than 10 seconds to load, around 50% of the people who visit such a page abandon it. You do not want this to happen.

What makes a site sluggish? How can you stop a site from loading at a snail-like pace?

There are many factors that can affect a site’s loading times, and you should be aware of these in order to give your customers what they want quickly:

Your images are too large – we all know that high-resolution images give site visitors the best possible images they can want, but this can also mean very slow loading times. You simply need to resize them in order to make them load faster. Scale your images properly and reduce the quality by a small bit when saving these newly edited images in order to reduce the file sizes of the pictures on your site. A quality of 80% or 90% when saving won’t affect your pictures that much, but it can help speed up your pages substantially.

Server performance – yes, your choice of server has a huge effect on how fast (or slow) your pages load. In order for your site to be fast enough for your visitors, you need to ensure that data can be loaded as quickly as possible to prevent page abandonment. There is the mistaken notion that shared servers are not good when it comes to site speed due to the shared resources with other websites. What people may not realize is that there is a shared service that actually gives a fast response time and thus makes your pages load quickly, and that is the cloud server option. This option is both cost effective and fast loading, which is ideal for those who want both a speedy and budget friendly server.

Your code is too bulky – just like large image files, dense code can also make your pages load very slowly. Excess spacing and white space can be the culprit when it comes to a page’s loading speed. While these elements can help make a page more readable, it also has an adverse effect, and that is the slowing down of your site. There are ways to make your pages more readable without all of these blank spaces, and condensing your code will make your pages load faster, thereby making your customers stay on your site longer.