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Issues Affecting Website Performance (and how to fix them)

Increase your site’s speed to improve performance

We all know too well that one of the main issues that can hinder a site’s performance is the page load speed. Page speed has become a ranking factor used by Google for both mobile and desktop searches. Slow loading pages have a high bounce rate and increasing your site speed is one of the best ways to improve the overall site performance.

This article is based on a research done by SEMrush on factors that affect website performance. The study featured 150,000 random websites which were analyzed to determine how well they performed. One of the shocking outcomes of the study is how most of the analyzed sites (precisely 82%) were found to have serious performance issues. However, a majority of those issues that hindered the site’s performance could be fixed using very simple site optimization and server configuration techniques.

Major issues found on analyzed websites

There are several issues that were found to have a negative impact on site performance. They include:

• Slow loading web pages
• Uncompressed CSS and JavaScript files
• Uncompressed pages
• CSS and JavaScript files that are too large
• Unnecessary CSS and JavaScript files
• Large HTML page size
• Too many redirects

Addressing common bsite performance issues

One of the issues that was very common on analyzed websites is redirect chains and loops. Do not test your user’s patience by having so many redirects on your website. Avoid redirect chains which could also confuse search engine crawlers. With each redirect, your page loses its original rank and because search engines have a limited crawling budget, this will ultimately undermine the page’s ranking.
Keeping your website structure clean gets harder and harder when your site grows. It’s easy for you to have so many redirects when your site is migrated to HTTPS or renamed. Just try and implement redirects only when it’s necessary. Remember that with each redirect, you create an unnecessary delay before the user gets to the destination page.

Put your page on a diet

Sounds cheesy, doesn’t it? But if you want to optimize your page performance try and avoid having heavy pages on your site or large JS and CSS files. In fact, your entire site shouldn’t be larger than 2MB. Anything larger than that is considered heavy and will hinder the site load speed. Don’t crowd your pages with too many visuals (images and videos). These two will take up the largest part of your site, therefore, try and get rid of anything unnecessary. Remember, less is more.

Minify your JS and CSS

This can simply be done by getting rid of any unnecessary lines, comments from source code among other stuff. When you reduce the size of these files, you’ll enhance the site load speed, give users a better experience and improve your search rankings.

Fix server issues

One factor that could significantly affect site load speed is its server. If the web server is not efficient, the web pages will take time to load. This means you need to ensure that your hosting service is top notch. You may have the best SEO Toronto but if you maintain the same inefficient hosting provider, your rankings will not improve. You may also get your own dedicated server if you can afford it.

Mobile websites need a very reliable server because most of their users are on the go and need a site that doesn’t take too long to load. In fact, by taking steps to improve your site load speed, you could increase your revenue. You may also want to check issues such as slow database queries that could be slowing down your server response time.

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