A few seconds (or even less) take a potential customer to close a website because it is too slow and before it even fully loads.

Yes, this time is very short and very important!

And many websites can be very fast in the beginning, but over time they become very slow, which affects not only the user experience but also SEO (Google ranking – slower website ranks lower = fewer visitors).

In today’s post, I share the top 3 reasons for a slow website + solutions, of course:

1 | Low-quality hosting services

Hosting is the place where your website lives and is a very important part of the website and also affects the speed of the website.

The solutions:

When choosing a hosting service, don’t let the price be the only factor. Check their offer, also check their support (eg ask a question and wait for an answer) and customer opinions, if available. Also, check that there are no hidden costs (eg extra payment for access to the website or transfer to another provider – this is not ok and it happens).

If you already have a hosting service and you are not satisfied then it is time to switch it. Most providers offer you a free website migration.

2 | Too heavy website code (theme, plugins…)

Each website is built differently. Some are built custom to the wishes of the client, others use ready-made themes. And those also differ in quality (not just design).

How to choose a good theme or plugin?

The theme often offers a lot of elements and different options – which can be great, but there is also quickly the problem that such themes are often greedy and slow down the website. So I suggest you think about what you really need and use a theme, plugins that slow down your website as little as possible.

The solutions:

First, you should choose the right person/company to build your website.

It is recommended that the code is cleared, minimized, compressed, and your website uses Cache. It is also very important to take care of regular updates (CMS, themes, plugins, PHP versions…).

3 | Un-optimized photos

One of the biggest reasons for a slow website is oversized, unoptimized photos! They are too big in terms of dimensions and the size they take up on the disk. These are not only a problem for the slow website but they are also not SEO optimized (for search engines like Google).

The solutions:

Each photo should be first resized to the right size for your website, properly named, compressed, optimized, and finally further SEO optimized.

Detailed instructions on how to handle photos for the website you can find in my new online program: