I built the website for our business with a site builder that our hosting company offered (not Wordpress). I’m OK with the site for now, but some people have said that it takes a long time to load. It loads pretty fast for me, though. Is this something I can fix? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.
Hi JD,
I’m not sure what site builder you used, but many of them are dated and don’t produce efficient sites. One of the biggest contributors to bad load times, however, is something you can handle yourself: overly large images.
If you add images straight from your camera they may be three or four times the size you really need to display on your page. For example, let’s say you had a page similar to this one, and you wanted your image to take up the entire width of the content area. On this page, that’s 660 pixels. Even camera phones tend to produce images at least two times that width – sometimes much larger. The bigger the dimensions, the larger the file size.
Site builder apps may appear to allow you to resize images, but oftentimes they’re only telling browsers to display them at a smaller size – they’re not actually resizing the image. You need to use an image editing app to save your image so that it’s only as big as you need it. Also, using numerous images on a single page can cause slow load times, even if each image isn’t that big.
I’m just guessing at what may be the issue since you didn’t share a URL. You may want to use Pingdom’s Website speed test to see for yourself what elements on your site take the longest to load. You can find it here: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
If the problem is indeed too-large images, an app running on your Mac or PC will most quickly help you resize your images. Alternatively, you can try an online tool like Web Resizer [ http://www.webresizer.com/ ].
Thanks for asking a question. Let me know if you need any further information or clarification.