3 Things Slowing Down Your Website

It is important to have a fast website. If your have a slow website, it is turning would be customers away. To understand the importance of a fast website, read our previous post here.

But how do you fix a slow website? We at Distillery Creative have the ability to zero in on what is making your website slow and use the tools of our trade to maximize your website speed.  But, if you want to do a little self-evaluation first, here are some of the things that could be causing your website to load slowly:

1. Oversized, Unoptimized Photos

We see this problem a lot with people who have made their own website via the Squarespace or Wix products, or who didn’t hire a professional web developer to design their website. Many people assume that you need high-resolution photos for the web just like you would for print. This is in fact the opposite of the truth. High-resolution photos can slow your site down by minutes. Every photo or graphic that is on your website needs to be optimized for the web. Full width photos should be no larger than 2,000 pixels. Half page images no larger than 600 pixels. When saving your file in any of the adobe products click “Export > Save for Web Legacy” and double check your dimensions to make sure its not too high a resolution. Large photos will slow down a website so much that eventually the whole thing might not load if the images aren’t properly optimized.

2. Bad Hosting

If you’re hosting your website with a big company like Blue Host or GoDaddy, your website may run slower because they host hundreds of websites on the same server. You have no control over the speed of your website when it is hosted by a big company. We work with private hosting companies where we have immediate access and immediate troubleshooting capabilities if your websites starts running slowly. Usually with larger hosting companies you can fix the speed of your website for an increased fee. No one should have to pay more for speed that should be standard.

3. Too Many Plugins

If you have a lot of plugins on the backside of your website then you are slowing your site down. Each plugin has a different “weight;” meaning, some plugins have more code than others and will slow your site down more than other plugins. If your website has a lot of plugins or outdated plugins then they could be giving you a slow website.

If your website is running slowly check these things on the backside of your website first. If you can’t figure it out or are having trouble nailing down the diagnosis of your website slowness then give us a call!