You know your self that undue waiting for a site to load because of reduced loading times is horrible for any conversions. So you already know just from your own experience with your site if it loads too long or not. Fortunately, this is something that is not hard to take care of, and we will cover a couple of things you can do.
The best thing to do first is assess your sites, but you will have a general idea just from your own experiences. Once you know the actual speed of loading, then you can move forward with improvements with a metric against which you can compare. As you can imagine, there are tons of free load time testing sites you can pick and choose from.
Even though this may not be the reason for your website's slowdown, but it may make a significant impact when you avoid using popup ads on your site. If you are thinking about using them, then just test them out and see the impact on your metrics. Any of the different applications using a popup concept will not adversely impact your loading times, though. Some webmasters care about this issue and others do not, and we do not know how you feel about it.
If you outsource your design work, then great, but we always recommend to people that they take the time to gain some knowledge on a subject. There may come a time when it is necessary to make a change that is not terribly involved, and you can simply go in and do it your self. If you are a technophobe, then that is what it is - however, if not then it is a smart thing to do in our opinion.
Simple to apply tips that can prove to be highly effective when it comes to decreasing the page load times. But most people are lazy, we think, and they will never seriously pursue any of this, but maybe you are different? Overall, your efforts to minimize the load times of your website will prove to be successful if you take simple steps on a regular basis to not only keep a tab on the speed, but to also make necessary changes to get better loading times.