Website Speed
Everything in the modern digital world revolves around effectiveness and app or website speed. And among all the performance problems with websites, slow loading times are one of the main reasons people stop visiting WordPress websites. There’s little doubt that if your website loads slowly compared to what it should, your visitors and revenue will suffer.
Many developers and business owners ask how to improve website speeds after realizing this. You’ll learn why quick load times are important for the content that follows, and you’ll also get some advice on how to make improve your website speed.
Fortunately, there are approaches to accelerate your website. Just keep in mind that before a user can fully appreciate your page, every content management system will need to load all relevant elements, whether they are operating in the background or are visible on the page.
You might be wondering at this point how fast your page loads affect how users feel about it. Unfortunately, if your page loads slowly, they might not do anything at all.
What is the Importance of a Fast Loading Website?
Ranking High on Google SERP
Every company nowadays is seeking ways to rank highly on the front pages and differentiate itself from the competition. Your website will probably be shown on the second or third result page if it doesn’t load quickly. Google prioritizes websites that offer the best user experience for online searches, which explains why.
Google unveiled a brand-new ranking factor called “Page Speed” in April 2010. In addition, as part of the transition to a more mobile-friendly algorithm, this measure was modified in 2016 to concentrate on the loading time of mobile web pages.
Your audience will love surfing and stay on your site longer in search of the information they need if it loads more quickly. Website speed is essential for responding to user queries quickly with information. This makes a good impression on Google, which elevates your website’s position on the result pages.
Better User Experience
No matter how visually stunning your website is, if it is slow, visitors will find it difficult to navigate and finally go in search of a better option.
A quick website, in general, makes browsing easier and improves the entire experience of your users when they visit your site. One of the elements that have been demonstrated as increasing the user bounce rate of websites is slow loading times. People may grow impatient while waiting for a page to fully load on slow websites.
Additionally, speed enhances the functioning of your website overall and provides visitors more time and freedom to explore various parts of it.
Reduced Bounce Rates
A speedier website draws more traffic than a slower one, which is an excellent additional benefit. Due to the improved user experience it offers, users are more likely to return and stay on the site longer, which lowers bounce rates and boosts conversion rates.
Customers that visit a slow website will probably leave after a short while without taking any action. This is due to the fact that the majority of internet users lack the patience to wait for a slow page to load. Whether a customer chooses to keep opening the website depends on its speed.
Better Conversion Rates
A positive user experience can make it easier for consumers to convert. It may seem absurd, but think about it: would you bother shopping on an e-commerce site if it took you an absurdly long time to get from the shopping page to the checkout page? Your conversion rate can be increased by increasing the performance and design of your website.
A user is more likely to spend time on a website that loads quickly, looking for information that will help them with their problems. If the user thinks your content is valuable to them, they may scroll to the bottom of the page and click the call to action there.
What Causes a Website to be Slow?
- Web hosting – Your website’s speed may suffer if your web hosting server is improperly set up.
- WordPress configuration – If your WordPress website is not serving cached content, it will overload your server, making it slow or crashing completely.
- Page Size – Mostly unoptimized photos for the web.
- Bad plugins – Using a plugin that is badly coded will cause your website to load far more slowly.
- External Scripts – Ads, font loaders, and other external programs can all significantly affect how well your website performs.
What are the Ways of Improving WordPress website Speed?
Install a Cache Plugin
WordPress must go through a procedure to get the necessary data, put it all together, and then display it to the user in order to develop your pages. This procedure has numerous steps, which might significantly slow down your website when numerous users are accessing it simultaneously.
We advise using a cache plugin on every WordPress website because of this. Your WordPress site could become up to 5 times faster using caching.
Your caching plugin copies the page after the initial load and then serves that cached version to each subsequent user, saving you from having to generate the page from scratch each time.
When making changes to your WordPress website, it’s possible that the front-end content won’t update immediately. Users frequently need to clear the cache in order for the updates to appear. WordPress websites are, nevertheless, faster thanks to web caching.
Consequently, WordPress caching plugins can aid in improving cache management. The appropriate setup and tools can potentially considerably improve the functionality of your website.
There are several wonderful WordPress caching plugins available, however, we suggest using either the free LiteSpeed Cache plugin or the paid WP Rocket plugin.
See our step-by-step instructions on installing and configuring LiteSpeed Cache on your WordPress website. Your guests will notice the difference, and the setup is simple.
Image Optimization
The practice of delivering high-quality photographs in the correct format, dimension, size, and resolution while preserving the smallest possible size is known as image optimization.
Image scaling, caching, and size reduction are only a few methods for achieving picture optimization. Enter ImageKit, an application for intelligent image optimization that enhances images using an intelligent compression method.
Image optimization is available for desktop and mobile web pages to speed up page loading. They enhance the purchasing experience for consumers. If your website loads slowly for even two seconds, your bounce rate could increase by 103%.
More consumers will interact with your products and services if using your website is quicker. You may measure the speed at which your web page loads using a number of tools, including Google’s PageSpeed Insights, ImageKit’s Website Analyzer, and Web Page Test.
We have a full article on how to optimize images for your WordPress website.
Keep Your Website Updated
WordPress is regularly updated because it is an open-source project that is well maintained. Along with adding new features, updates also correct bugs and security holes. Additionally, your WordPress theme and plugins should be updated frequently.
You can make sure that your website always has the most recent performance and security enhancements by updating your WordPress site. Performance and security are intertwined; if a WordPress site is weak, it may be sluggish or even unusable.
Only the WordPress core can have minor upgrades enabled automatically, and most users should do so. Major updates might introduce substantial changes that are inappropriate for your WordPress website.
It is your duty as the website owner to maintain your WordPress site, theme, and plugins updated to the most recent versions. If you don’t, your website can become unstable and slow, opening you up to security risks.
Choose a Reliable Web Hosting
The hosting of your WordPress website is the main aspect that affects website speeds. Hosting your new website with a shared hosting company that provides “unlimited” bandwidth, space, emails, domains, and other services could seem like a good idea. The aspect of this offer that we frequently overlook is the fact that most shared hosting setups cannot guarantee 99.9% uptime or good loading times during periods of high traffic.
To have the fastest WordPress website speed, plan ahead and take into account the volume of content you intend to post and your expected traffic. The ideal layout would have adequate resources for everyday use and some extra space for renovations and unforeseen spikes in heavy traffic.
Although it makes sense to try to save money whenever you can, giving hosting a high priority in your spending plan. It’s a fundamental investment that can improve the overall website speed.
Use Lightweight WordPress Themes
WordPress themes with numerous dynamic features, sliders, widgets, social media icons, and other dazzling components are very eye-catching. But keep in mind that if they contain too many elements and larger page sizes, your web server will undoubtedly take a beating.
Website speed optimization should be a top priority when choosing a theme for your website. Some themes that look stunning and impressive are actually badly coded and can significantly slow down your website.
A simpler theme is typically preferable to one that is overstuffed with intricate layouts, eye-catching animations, and other superfluous elements. You can always use top-notch WordPress plugins to add those functionalities.
Here is a list of the best WordPress themes in 2022
Avoiding and Deleting Poorly Coded Plugins and Unused Plugins
No matter if your website needs it or not, poorly coded WordPress plugins frequently load too much bloat. This increases your page load speed while affecting website speed.
You might also want to delete unwanted plugins and themes, in addition to the fact that you should always maintain them updated. Unused plugins and themes can hinder the WordPress website speed in addition to posing security risks. You must first deactivate unused WordPress plugins before deleting them. The ones you no longer desire can then be listed and deleted.
In order to thoroughly uninstall an inactive plugin, more steps may be necessary to remove any remaining database queries and WordPress configuration. With security or caching plugins, this circumstance is typical.
Examine the plugin’s official documentation, which describes how to properly uninstall it, before you remove a deactivated plugin, and maintain a decent to great website speed.
Optimizing WordPress Database
All of the data on your website, including posts, pages, theme, and plugin settings, is kept in a database. WordPress’s default database is MySQL.
Your WordPress database may bloat with extra data over time, making your website look bloated, thereby affecting website speed. Post revisions, removed comments, outdated plugin settings, and unused tags are examples of unnecessary data. You may optimize your database to get rid of all that extra data for better performance.
Through phpMyAdmin, you may manually clean out your database, but doing so might be dangerous and destructive if you don’t know what you’re doing. Installing a plugin to complete this task is the safer option if you’re not tech-savvy. To sweep through your database and get rid of stuff like outdated revisions, spam comments, MySQL queries, and more, WP-Sweep and Advanced Database Cleaner are both good plugin options.
Use a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of geographically dispersed servers that collaborate to hasten the delivery of websites to consumers’ browsers.
It’s the ideal answer for a global WordPress website with regionally dispersed target consumers. A CDN reduces the time it takes for a website to load by lowering the distance between the user and the server.
When you employ a CDN, the closest server is used to serve those static files to users each time they visit your website. Considering that the CDN is handling a lot of the work, your own web hosting server will also be quicker.
The needs of your site and its popularity will determine which CDN you use. Some CDN options for WordPress are MaxCDN, Cloudflare, or CacheFly.
Minify CSS, HTML and JavaScript files
Your site may become slow to load and navigate as a result of accumulated CSS, HTML, and other source code files. You should think about minifying the code on your website to increase your website speed.
In order to minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files, unnecessary characters must be removed. Because data transfers between servers and browsers will be speedier, you can improve WordPress website speed by using fewer files.
Your site’s backend will be made into a lean, mean machine through minification. By removing extra characters like spaces, line breaks, and comments, this technique serves to shrink the size of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files.
Additionally, if you are familiar with WordPress themes, you can study the Google guides and perform some manual corrections. If not, there are plugins that can assist you in achieving this goal; the most well-known of these is Autoptimize, which can aid in the optimization of your WordPress website’s CSS, JS, and even HTML.
The main benefit of improving your website speed is that it will significantly enhance the user experience for your visitors. Regardless of whether they are using PCs or mobile devices, the situation is the same. Additionally, your SERP rankings will rise as a result. After all, you will only gain in the short and long terms if your hosting uses less bandwidth and your clients can access your site more quickly.
