November 5th, 2021 by esigners
Your business website can have the best design or most engaging content, but if the loading speed is slow, all your efforts will go in vain. If your business website takes anything more than 2-3 seconds to load, you will lose your website visitors. But do you know what elements are killing your website?
Here are eight things that are top on the list:
1. Huge Non-optimized Images
Images can make your website look attractive but unnecessarily adding huge, chunky images that are not well optimized in the middle of the screen is distracting and slows down your website. Search engines will also rank your website lower. Use online tools such as TinyPNG and Lossless JPEG to reduce the image sizes without bothering the quality of the images.
2. Unprofessional jQuery
Your website can certainly turn more interactive with tools like jQuery but there are some unnecessary features as well that can slow down your website. To avoid this only use elements that you need or optimize it or rewrite the code.
3. Ad Code
Never go over the top with animated GIFs, auto-playing videos on your website. These elements slow down your website to a large extent which creates a negative effect on the conversions. Go for tools that are mobile compatible and load quickly. If you place ads on your website, consult with an expert web designer so that there are no speed bump happens.
4. Overstuffed HTML
Too much coding on the website does more harm than good. Servers take a lot of time to process such lengthy codes which again slows down the loading speed of your website. Make sure that your codes are more functional than bulky. Check out ways to streamline your code.
5. CSS and Poor Stylesheets
Stylesheets are crucial for web pages since they contain java script, images, and also format text. But going overboard with it is a major website speed killer. Once your website has a lot of traffic, install a content delivery network (CDN) or use a Critical CSS service to significantly reduce the download size of stylesheets.
6. MP4 Files or Videos
Never incorporate self-hosted MP4 files or videos on your website. Video files are quite large and hosting them on a single server with a limited amount of bandwidth can cause several technical errors such as video pauses or lower resolution. Even if you want to include video content on your website, always go for video links that re-directs people to third-party video hosting sites like YouTube or Vimeo.
7. Analytics Tags
Most websites are embedded with multiple, heavy analytic tags that slow down websites considerably. Use only light-weight analytics tags that are universally accepted. Embed forms are also a big reason behind many slow-loading websites. Sites like Google form, Mailchimp, etc. that use embed forms on web pages utilize a lot of external codes are a big website speed killer.
8. Social Media Feed
Never try to embed your live social media feed on your website, for instance, your Instagram or Twitter feed. It can kill your website loading speed massively. Anything that you place on your website should better the experience for your website visitors. Adding a social feed on a website will hamper the usability factor significantly.