The Most Common Cause Of A Slow Website Page Speed

Are you losing customers to sluggish page loads? A study by Google revealed that 53% of mobile users abandon sites with more than a 3-second delay.

Bounce rate matters!

You work hard to attract visitors to your site, but if a page takes too long to load, customers quickly bounce, costing you leads and conversions. Mobile users are especially impatient, expecting pages to load faster on mobile than a desktop.

Faster page speed will also improve your search engine ranking. Google’s shift to mobile-first indexing prioritises fast loading pages on mobiles.

What’s slowing you down?

Unnecessary CSS and JavaScript files are often the biggest culprits, slowing your site down with a lot of extra code from your theme, page builder and plug-ins. While these offer a range of elements and options for your site, they dramatically slow page speed.

How to speed things up

At TunedWP, we take a critical look at what website elements are generating more leads and sales, and what is merely ‘window dressing’. As a rule of thumb, multi-purpose themes that offer a wide range of design options that are easy to do-it-yourself, generally bloat the page with more code to achieve that.

Remove unnecessary moving parts or heavy elements

The first step is to remove unnecessary plugins and replace slow plugins with lightweight alternatives and/or selectively disable plugins from specific pages where they don’t need to load.

Optimise images

Images make up around 60% of a total webpage’s weight. So, by reducing the size and number of images you will speed up the load time.

Reconsider carousels or sliders

Carousels are another heavy plugin or script. They might look good, but the stats just don’t stack up. Truth is, people have ‘banner blindness’ and tune out sliders (and anything else that looks like an ad). Only 1% click on a slider and 89% of those on the first slide.

Remove anything unnecessary

Remove any unused plugins and assess if others can be coded into the theme or achieved another way. For things like pop-ups, banners and live-chat, weigh up the benefits – click-through versus bounce rate/slow speed.

Replace plugins with lightweight alternatives

If you’re getting good value from a plugin, consider if there is a lightweight alternative you could swap it for.

Need help with your optimisation?

For a cleaner, leaner, faster website, contact the team at TunedWP. We optimise all our clients’ sites to reduce the bounce rate and improve SEO. Get Started with a Conversion Audit.

Or join the Evergreen Profit Membership and learn how to improve your website yourself.

Talk soon!