One of the most common problems that web design teams are asked about by prospective clients is slow loading websites. In this age where everything has to happen five seconds ago, and with super-fast broadband, it is an issue that does not normally have one generic answer. The reason for this is there are numerous reasons why a website might be loading slowly, and often more than one of them is occurring at the same time.

Apart from the fact that it is an inconvenience to all, a slow website has more far-reaching consequences. An immediate consequence is that having worked hard via SEO, or paid advertising such as Google Ads to drive traffic to your website, it is all to no avail as visitors simply click away when the website does not load within the first few seconds.

This not only is a huge lost opportunity in terms of generating leads and making sales, but it can also negatively impact your search engine rankings too. When Google sees that visitors are clicking away almost immediately or that they are spending very little time on your website, they see that as a red flag and a consequence of that is that they will be less keen to rank your website high on their search rankings.

So, there are plenty of reasons for wishing to increase the load speed of your website, and to do that you need to understand some of the main causes of it loading slowly. Here are 7 of the most common reasons which can all be rectified relatively easily, but please get in touch with Slinky Web Design if you need help.

Poor Hosting Provider

If you were to do any amount of research into hosting companies you would soon find that there are lots of them, and each of them will claim to offer almost 100% uptime and guaranteed fast load speeds. Unfortunately, that is not the reality, and many of them fail to deliver on what they promise.

If your website is hosted on one of the sub-standard hosting services, and it is loading slowly then it is highly likely that using such a host that is one of the root causes of the problem. Lower quality servers that cannot cope with any reasonable amount of traffic and which host many websites are not going to be able to cope, and thus the loading speeds of the websites hosted there are going to suffer.

Conversely, there are many excellent hosting companies available, and whilst some of them might cost a little bit more, that investment is more than repaid when their top specification servers allow your website to load almost instantaneously and close to 100% of the time, meaning the traffic, aka visitors, landing on your website remain there and for longer, giving you more opportunity to turn them into leads and customers.

There is a plethora of paid tools and software which can help with your SEO strategy, and no doubt each of them has it merits. However, there is a free tool, which means it is often overlooked or given the credit it deserves.

That tool is the Google Search Console, and it has several excellent features which can give your SEO efforts a significant helping hand in terms of being able to see how Google sees your website.

Google Search Console isn’t one tool but is instead a collection of tools that provide information relating to search traffic, crawling data, and search engine appearance. You may have heard of it being called one of its previous names, which were Google Webmaster Central and, more recently, Google Webmaster Tools.

To start using Google Search Console, there are a few steps you need to complete, which include opening a Google account if you do not already have one and then verifying your account, which can be done in several ways, including using SEO plugins such as Yoast.

You will then need to select settings such as whether you want your website to have ‘www.’ or not, how often you want Google to crawl your website, and if others work on your website, adding them as users.

Once you have everything set up, you can take advantage of the Google Search Console’s reporting features and, more importantly, start using them to make any changes to your SEO strategy that the information they provide suggests.