Is your business website’s page speed slow or does it often freeze or crash?

Then you should read on to understand the causes of slow website page speeds and possible solutions.

Having a speed optimized website is essential for any businesses today. A user-friendly online presence can make or break a business’ revenue generation as it impacts business trust and credibility.

So, how do you check and ensure that your business website meets all the standards to load and perform well for its users?

What determines Page Speed?

Page speed is measured by how quickly your content loads when visitors come to a page on your site.

Page speed and loading speed is influenced by elements on your website like:

• Number and size of images, videos, and other media files on the page
• Types and number of installed themes and plugins on your site
• Scripts and coding on your website and pages
• Hosting server capacity and type of web hosting

If some or all of these elements affect your website’s page speed negatively, then this impacts the user experience, which can lead to usability problems detected by search engine bots, which can lead to lower ranks and domain ratings.

The Importance of Page Speed?

Do you enjoy sitting in front a website that takes ages to load its content? Exactly, nobody does and likely leaves the site after a few seconds.

CEO of ClickDo and SeekaHost, Fernando Raymond, who started out as an SEO consultant in London, explains further: “The so-called bounce rate is used by search engines like Google (News - Alert) as a quality criterion for websites. According to Google research this bounce rate goes up by 32 percent when loading times increase from just one to three seconds. If loading times increase from one to five seconds, the bounce rate increases by 90 percent. This clearly shows what a big difference just a few seconds of slower page speeds and loading times make”.

Clearly, sluggish website pages are something to avoid ranking a website well on search engines and to keep more visitors coming.

This leads us to the next question: How to optimize a business website’s page speed?

3 Things to check to improve a Business Website’s Page Speed

Regardless of whether you’ve just built a new website for your business, or it suddenly is loading slower, it is important to detect possible issues and sort them for the optimal website performance.

1. Purchase your Website Domain with the right Hosting

Reliable web hosting is the backbone of every website. Identify a web host that offers high-quality web hosting packages suitable for your website needs and make sure their customer support is available around the clock to deal with any hosting issues right away.

To ensure a speedy website registration and hosting process where you have everything at your fingertips, you can head over to the SeekaHost Web Hosting Control Panel. Here you can register a domain name, choose your ideal web hosting plan, and get your website live in under 5 minutes.

Inside the panel you can monitor live traffic to your website during peak hours via the integrated tracking features so that you can rest assured that your hosting will be able to handle higher website traffic volumes without crashing. SeekaHost helps you fast with troubleshooting any issues when they occur with your website hosting.

Secure data transmission through encrypting data with an SSL certificate is another factor to ensure that the website supports the HTTPS protocol to reduce the chances of the website being hacked and possibly interrupted or slowed down. Users of the SeekaPanel can activate the SSL certificate for free for their website.

2. Use a Content Management System (CMS) with Speed Optimization Features

The content management system, CMS, that is used to modify, administer, and maintain existing website pages makes a big difference when it comes to optimizing a website quickly and effectively.  

With the SeekaHost App you can use the most popular CMS WordPress and you can get WordPress Hosting or managed WordPress hosting, which is specifically tailored to achieve the optimal website performance.

If you notice that your WordPress website is loading slower than usual, you can do the following:

• Compress and Optimize Files

Increase page loading speeds by changing file formats, enabling lazy loading, and compressing images through lossy or lossless compression. Pages will load more quickly with reduced file sizes. Fortunately, WordPress comes with free plugins for image optimization such as WP Smush or WP-Optimize 3.1.12. Simply install and activate the plugin inside your website’s WP dashboard and begin to resize and compress images that you can either select or have compressed in bulk.

Alternatively, you can use online image optimizers like Optimizilla or Compress PNG to reduce image file sizes before uploading them onto your website.

• Get automated Web Page Caching

Caching is often a major factor for slow page loading speeds, because during the caching process copies of files on your website are stored and if the cache is not cleared, the server requires more resources to load a page.  

Caching can be done at the server level, meaning the web host manages it automatically and this is included in the managed WordPress hosting plans with SeekaHost.

WordPress offers caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache for free, which makes caching your web pages quick and easy through automatic caching after installation and activation, if enabled in the settings.  

• Deactivate inactive Themes and Plugins

Check that you do not store any unnecessary themes or plugins on your WP site as these can also slow your loading speeds down. If you check your active themes and plugins and see that there are some inactive ones that you never use, you’re better off deleting them as they just take up unnecessary server and disk space.

If all attempts listed here fail, then you should immediately contact your host’s support team as at times additional website diagnostics are necessary to establish page speed loading issues on a website. The SeekaHost customer support team is available 24/7 through the live chat and ticket support system.

3.   Optimize your Business Website Further

There are many ways to further optimize your website. Here are a few that you can also investigate:

• Make sure to keep all web page content relevant and don’t overload pages.
• Always ensure your website is up to date and reflects the most recent information and content.
• Regularly check your website’s performance and status and update themes, plugins and WP versions where indicated.
• Check that your web hosting plan is still suitable as your website grows. You may require more disk and server space at some point and often slower loading speeds can be caused by that. Simply check your disk space inside the SeekaPanel and upgrade your hosting plan with one click.

Final Thoughts

As increasingly more customers go online to search for products and services, they check out your business website and make purchasing decisions based on their user experience. If they find it difficult and time-consuming to find something and purchase it via the business website, they are less likely to complete their purchase. With the website and page speed optimization tips listed in this article, your business website should provide all customers with a smooth and satisfying browsing experience so that they will return for more.

About SeekaHost: a web hosting provider with a difference

Offering web hosting services since 2000 this company has grown and expanded over the last five years under the management of SEO agency ClickDo, providing a wider variety of web hosting services like SEO hosting, PBN hosting, before being registered as a limited company in 2018. It now is an established web host offering services all over the world and innovating new hosting solutions.

SOURCE SeekaHost

Contact: Manuela Willbold, PR strategist, ClickDo and SeekaHost, [email protected]