4 Reasons Your Orthodontic Website Might Be Slow

If your orthodontic website looks amazing and has great SEO content, and eye-catching images, you have a lot to be happy about. But how is your website actually performing when people get to the landing page? If you find your website is slow, you should address this as soon as possible. Conversion rates on any website drop sharply as the loading time increases, so putting off fixing issues with speed on your website could cost you new patients. What exactly could be the culprit for your slow website? 

Backend Problems

If your website has code that was hastily written or includes a significant number of mistakes, your website will be much more susceptible to glitches. If your website is glitchy, it will certainly perform slower and cause more problems for your users. Take a look at your code, fix any mistakes you find, and see if your website starts to perform more quickly. 

In addition, the host you use for your website have server issues, causing your website to run slow or perhaps have trouble loading any pages at all. If your website host has consistent issues, it may be time to look elsewhere to provide a better user experience. It also could be a good time to consider upgrading your services to a higher level offered by your host since your current plan might not be able to handle your demands. 

Check Your Images

Good quality images can go a long way in supporting your content and making your website more engaging for all users. Unfortunately, failing to find a good balance with your images can have unintended consequences. Web pages can’t always support every kind of image and process quickly at the same time. Ideally images should be uploaded in JPEG form for a good balance of quality and space. Other image formats will demand too much memory and slow down your web pages. 

You should also use an image resizing tool to reduce the amount of pixels the image has, which will help your website process faster. Be sure not to make the image look too pixelated or mess with the aspect ratio.

Sometimes, your webpages just have too many images on them. If you clean up your pages by eliminating some unnecessary images, you might find your website looks cleaner in addition to working faster.

Too Many Functions on One Page

Being able to accomplish a lot from one page can be beneficial for orthodontic websites, but you’ll want to find the right balance. Because your website should be organized so visitors find what they are looking for quickly, focus on making additional pages easy to find and click to rather than overloading one page with lots of functions. If a page has too many HTTP requests, which occurs when a website has lots of elements on one page, your website will slow down. 

Failing to Use Browser Caching

You can set your website to include browser caching, which allows browsers visitors use to surf the web to save images and data from webpages the first time that particular visitor finds your site. After this, the browser can load the page quicker for the user because it can just retrieve the information rather than actually downloading it. 

When it comes to your orthodontic website, put the customer experience first from start to finish, including your website speed, and you’ll see your patient list grow in no time!