Search Engine Optimization is of course extremely important to your website, and should be looked at as a priority when building and maintaining a site, but it doesn’t just stop there.

There are many sites out there that are maintained decently well, and have okay traffic flow through them, but are so incredibly slow that it hurts the SEO results. There are a few reasons the website is moving so slow, some you can help, and some you cannot.

A couple reasons a website is moving slow that you cannot help: in the best scenario, you have so much traffic that it is actually about to crash the server it is on – and then there could be something wrong with the server. You can technically help the server with too much traffic by having it moved elsewhere, but for the purposes of this article, we’re going to say we can’t help either of these.

Here is a short list of things that could be slowing your site down that you CAN help:

  • Javascript
  • Flash
  • Large image files
  • Too many plug-ins
  • Too many things

Javascript and Flash are two website additions that tend to bog down the speed of a website pretty consistently. Large image files are not only referring to the size physically on the webpage, but the file size itself. It’s pretty simple: if it’s too big, it takes a long time to load. Plug-ins are nice additions to some websites, especially Wordpress, but you have to be careful with how many you use or it will greatly increase the load time for a webpage. And, along with all of these, a big factor to slowing down is that there are simply too many things. Whether it be all of these combined, or just too many of one of them. They all contribute.

There are some steps you can take to help eliminate these problems for your website.

Javascript: Not only is this decreasing the SEO of your website, but you may have too many little codes running all at the same time. Take a look at them. Do you really need all of your navigation to be in Javascript? Do you have a text alternative for it so search engines can find it? Can you just make it text instead? If you can’t change everything, make a list in order of importance. What cannot change, and what could potentially change.

Flash: Do you really need all of those Flash animations smothering your webpage? Sure, they move and they’re fun to look at, but unless your website is about Flash animation, you really don’t need all of that fancy stuff on there. People want content. Adding some Flash accents is of course a good idea for aesthetics, but do not base your entire website off of these animations. Besides, search engines struggle with finding these, so they’re not really helping the SEO.

Large image files: This is a simple one – make them smaller. There are options in your image editing programs to save images for webpages. There are a few different types of files you want to use on a website – JPG, GIF and PNG. If it’s a photo, use your JPG setting, if it has transparency or a lot of areas of flat color (like a cartoon), a GIF or PNG file will be good. Never use a BMP on your website. These files are huge.

Too many plug-ins: Same as I said earlier, do you really need all of these plug-ins? No, you do not. Too many of them activated and loading all at the same time cause major disturbances in the data flow. Often times, plug-ins load first, before your style sheet and text and images. Having one or two on your website isn’t a bad idea, but be selective, and determine whether you actually need it or not.

Too many things: This is probably the easiest one to resolve. If you have too many things on one page, it is going to slow you down. People don’t do well with clutter on a website. It’s confusing, and distracting. If there are too many things your visitors are going to miss half of the information, so clean it up! And this applies to all of the previously mentioned items on the list. If you have too many, get rid of them, you do not need them.

I hope this helps you all clean up your websites some! A daunting task, I know, especially if you have spent so much time polluting your website. It is however, well worth the time spent to clean it up.