Why Is Target Website So Slow? Here Are The Reasons

Target Corporation is an American retailer headquartered in Minneapolis. You can also buy online from their website at Target.com

A speed report from Lighthouse paints a rather grim picture and scores Target website 11.8 seconds on the speed index (SI), and 37 on Performance.

There are many reasons why the Target website is so slow. This includes:

• Bloated JavaScript files
• Unnecessarily large image files
• Absence of lazyloading
• Slow server
• Old Image formats

Let’s look at each of these reasons and identify potential ways that Target can make their website load faster.

But before we do that, a quick word about our website CWVIQ.com - we are a free email alert service that sends out notification any time your website is loading very slowly (often due to heavy traffic, or poor scripts). If you have a website, consider setting up an alert so that you can fix issues before they become major. 

Bloated JavaScript files

uses a lot of JavaScript to run the website. However, loading them all from one source could slow up the performance of the website. can avoid this by splitting the code into smaller files. This way, you only load files that are necessary.

The website can be as much as 2.25 seconds faster by adopting this technique.

Unnecessarily large image files

Another common problem that users face – especially when they access the website while on the move – is having to load unnecessarily large image files that are not optimized for the mobile phone. Not everyone has access to WiFi at all times. Loading oversized product images is unnecessary.

According to the Lighthouse estimate, Target website homepage can load 1.95 seconds faster if it made all the images more cellular-data-friendly.

Absence of lazyloading

Images and videos are by far the most resource-intensive assets and take up a lot of bandwidth during the page-loading process. This can be a real problem on shopping websites since they typically include a lot of graphical content.

But here is the thing – a user who visits the website is not going to need all the images on the page to load. Instead, they only need those images on the top fold of the website to load. The rest can be ‘lazy-loaded’ – that is, they can be loaded after all the other critical components of the webpage have completed loading.

The homepage can load as much as 1.8 seconds faster if images were lazyloaded.

Slow server

According to the Lighthouse report, a slow server may be contributing to nearly 0.6 seconds of additional loading time. In addition to upgrading the server hardware and database systems, Target should also look into the server’s application logic to prepare pages faster.

Old Image formats

The website uses a lot of JPG and PNG files that are considered outdated and heavy for modern web use. Replacing them with WebP and AVIF files can save as much as 0.15 seconds from the page loading time.