Having a slow website doesn’t only mean that your visitors will have a bad experience and that you’ll lose conversions; it will also affect your visibility on search engines. If you didn’t already know, page performance is one of the major indicators Google uses to rank websites, and if your website is underperforming, this could have far-reaching consequences for your business as a whole. If you’ve noticed that your website is sluggish lately, here are four possible things that could affect its loading time.

Your Hosting Package

If you’re currently using a cheap shared hosting package, you may have found the reason for your issues right there. Shared hosting plans are simply not a good option for a serious business as you’re literally sharing the server and bandwidth with other websites. If there’s a surge of traffic on one or multiple of these sites, your site’s performance will suffer.

If money is an issue, know that you don’t have to invest in a server or even go for a dedicated hosting plan. A virtual private server will do just fine. While your site will still be hosted on the same server as others, each will have its dedicated resources so none can throttle on another one’s bandwidth.

Your Images Are Too Bulky

We’re not talking about size when we talk about bulky images, though this can also be a factor. Loading images with large file sizes can be very demanding on a PC, especially when there are many of them. This is why you should look at the format you’re currently using for your pictures and see if you could go for a lighter one. You could also reduce the file size of your images by compressing them.

JavaScript Issues

JavaScript is one of the backbones of the internet. This is what makes your site interactive and usable for users. If you don’t optimize JavaScript, however, it can significantly increase loading times. The user’s computer will have to spend extra time and power on rendering heavy JavaScript before it can display a page. This is what is referred to as ‘render-blocking JavaScript’, and is very bad news for a site’s performance. In this case, you can choose to either use inline JavaScript files instead of external ones, use asynchronous JavaScript loading where the script loads independently from the page, or delay JavaScript loading until users can see the rest of the page.

You Aren’t Using a Content Delivery Network

Content delivery networks, or CDNs for short, are networks of servers that are dispersed strategically around the globe. These allow you to store full copies of your pages or only some elements. This will improve loading times for people who are closer to these servers than they are to your main server.

If you aren’t using them already, you should right now as they’re rather inexpensive and a must if you have an international audience. Some of the most popular CDNs include Cloudflare and Jetpack CDN.

Now that you know a bit more about what could be affecting your page loading speeds, you can start making corrections right away. Performance is very important in this day and age, so you’ll need to constantly work to improve your site’s speed and overall user experience.