Want to know what a good average speed for your website is? The short answer: as fast as possible.

According to GTmetrix, the average fully loaded time for websites is around 6.2 seconds. If your website has a painful loading time, there are various factors that could be slowing it down and affecting the user experience. There are a lot of factors that come to play when determining website speed and they vary greatly.

Could these factors be impacting your website’s speed?

Below are some things that could be impacting your website’s speed. Let’s use a typical WordPress website as an example.

Unoptimized images are a big one. Large images can very easily slow down your website. Luckily you can reduce the size without loosing the quality through software like Adobe’s Photoshop or with an image compression program like TinyJPG.

File-heavy web pages. Browser caching is when an internet browser (like Google) loads a webpage and all it’s files when you visit the page. If the page is file-heavy, it takes the browser longer to load your page and this could be slowing your website down.

Large and unnecessary amounts of code. If you have unnecessary code on your website it could be impacting the speed. If you have experience, you could remove code that is inactive. This mainly applies to CSS and JavaScript. Be sure to remove unused external stylesheets and JavaScript.

Too many plugins could cause your website to be slow. Each plugin makes it’s own file request, so try to keep them to a minimum. Personally I find that feature-heavy plugins like Jetpack or Broken Link Checker can impact your speed. Online Media Masters have written a wonderful comprehensive list of plugins that could be slowing down your website. Use only what’s necessary and disable unused settings.

Poor server performance. If you are hosting with a crappy hosting provider they could give you a shared server – meaning your website is sharing resources with other websites. If you have optimized every other part of your website and it’s still very slow, this could be the reason why. If you need a recommendation for a good hosting provider, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Free website speed analysis

Are you unsure how fast your website is loading? Don’t hesitate to contact me for a free speed analysis. No obligations, no spam mail – just an honest free website speed scan! I will provide you with your website’s fully-loaded time and a breakdown of where your website’s speed needs improvement. There are definitely some things you as a business owner can easily do to improve your speed. Make your users happy.