Why is my website so slow?

Why speed matters for websites

Speed makes or breaks your website. It matters how well your site loads, whether pages are interactive and clear, and whether users get a good experience. All of these things are important factors in how effectively your customers interact with your site and how happy they are with your organization.

While it's tempting to think that a higher loading speed means faster devices (hardware), it's actually the interaction between the browser and the server that gives users an optimal experience — which means load times don't always tell the whole story. Mobile devices are generally not always connected to a fast Wi-Fi network or do not always have sufficient range for their 3.4 and 5G connections. That's why developers split website speed optimization into “mobile” and “non-mobile” users.

Speed has become an increasingly important measure of SEO. With the web getting faster every day, website users are visiting more websites to find what they're looking for and decide if there's a match or not. So there are many more alternatives for the same search, so your website becomes a more pleasant environment with faster loading times to “be there”. The chance then increases that the user will stick around longer and even interact with the website. Together, our goal is to make the website a pleasant environment, so that the chances of success - for both the visitor (in many cases this is finding a solution) and also that of the company (acquiring customers) increases.

How to measure the speed of your website

There is a lot of information about how to measure website speed, but most tools focus on plugins and desktop tools. Our favorite tool for measuring website speed is called PageSpeed Insights. This tool was created by Lighthouse, a subsidiary of Google.

Lighthouse identifies strengths and weaknesses. The Lighthouse website speed analysis tool shows you how many seconds it takes for your website to load in each direction on mobile and desktop devices. It is also clear whether there are so-called 'cumulative layout shifts'take place. These are annoying jumps while loading that the user gets to see. It then analyses the content along with the source (detecting technical issues), and provides useful tips for improving page speed.

Click here to go to PageSpeed Insights.

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How to improve website speed.

Of course, you can largely rely on the tips that Lighthouse gives you. But it's always helpful to solve the biggest retarders first. Then you will have a lot of results and your website user will be happy sooner. Below is a list of priority issues that we regularly encounter:

Server configuration
One of the biggest factors that contribute to the slow loading time of a website is not having an optimal server configuration. This means that the web server is not responding quickly enough to user requests, so your website may appear unreachable. This can be caused by many factors, so it's important to thoroughly understand the cause of the problem before you spend hours fixing it.

Delayed JavaScript and styling
JavaScript and CSS are 2 of the 3 main components that make up a website. If they work properly, they can accelerate the loading time of your website. But in many cases, each piece of code is a delaying factor. Sometimes, your site can become so slow, simply because the code (the amount, order, and way in which) that was written for your site is loading.

Images are not loading properly
Images are beautiful, but slow-loading images frustrate your visitors and can damage your search engine rankings. Images on your site cost a lot of “resources” and can be “render blocking.” In fact, this means that the browser can't do anything else until the images load. So it's much more valuable to the user if they load quickly, because other elements remain invisible until the sources of the images are downloaded.
It is possible to reduce the size of images (i.e. how big the files are) without affecting how beautifully the image appears. To do this, there are algorithms that can help you.

Conclusion

It is possible to optimize almost any website at any time of the day. There are a lot of factors that can affect your website's performance, from your server's service level to the size of the website's content.

There are really a lot of things you can do about your own website to improve its performance. But when it comes to optimizing a website and its code used by search engines, there are quite a few things to keep in mind. Rootsteps therefore ensures that you don't have to worry about this yourself. The website is regularly checked and improved. This way, you reap the benefits of a maintenance contract and you always make use of the fastest possible means.

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