Did you know Google’s algorithms use site speed as a signal to rank pages? A slow WordPress site not only hurts the user experience but also affects your SEO efforts. In this article we give you 7 Quick Ways to Speed up Your WordPress Website.
A one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
A slow site is probably the last thing your customers want to browse on the web. This means having a fast site is essential to your business growth.
Table of Contents
Why WordPress Site Speed Matters?
It’s not all about ranking well with Google, slow WordPress site kills conversions and your chances of achieving sustainable growth using digital means.
Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes to understand why WordPress site speed matters. Nearly half of consumers expect web pages to load in less than 2 seconds.
If your WordPress site takes more than 3 seconds to load, you’re losing almost half of your visitors before they even visit your site.
The rest of the visitors who decide to give your site a chance will end up being disappointed.
So, speed up your WordPress site if you don’t want slow load times to deter your visitors from returning in the future.
How to test the loading time of your website?
It takes only a few seconds to test the loading time of a web page. The loading time may differ from page to page. Therefore, test individual pages on your site to see the big picture.
You can use the homepage of your WordPress site as a benchmark to measure the loading time.
PageSpeed Insights is a simple and fast platform to highlight areas on your website that need attention. For example, it will identify how removing unused CSS can help your page load faster.
You can speed up your WordPress site only when you discover the hidden issues. You can use other free tools like GTmetrics and WebPage Test to find out more about the performance of your site.
1. Choose a quality web hosting provider
The speed of your WordPress website depends on a variety of factors. Web hosting is probably one of the often-ignored page speed topics.
When a user loads a webpage, they’re opening files from a web server.
The faster that web server, the more quickly the webpage will load. So, make sure to select the right web hosting package for your WordPress website.
Some web hosting packages are faster than others. Things that make a hosting package faster are similar to things that make a computer run faster, for example, faster hard drives and available resources.
Woblogger identifies Cloudways as an ideal web hosting provider for WordPress websites. Also, they offer a $30 discount for their readers. Woblogger readers can enjoy 3 months of free hosting on the Cloudways managed cloud hosting platform.
2. Use a theme optimized for WordPress
Not all WordPress themes are created equal. Some are stunningly fast; others are bloated with bells and whistles. A well-coded theme optimized for WordPress considerably improves the page load speed.
When you choose a theme for your site, make sure to test page speed before implementing it. See how fast it runs with nothing added to it. It will give you an idea of a theme’s performance in terms of speed.
3. Use an effective caching plugin
Caching also helps you speed up your WordPress website. It allows your site to skip a lot of steps. Caching plugins make a copy of a page after the first load so that users don’t have to go through the entire page generation process every time, they visit a particular page.
Caching is critical because it makes things easier for your WordPress hosting server and improves page load speed. Therefore, use an effective caching plugin to boost your website speed.
WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and Sucuri Firewall are some of the recommended caching plugins for WordPress.
4. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Minification is a process of removing redundant and unnecessary data without disturbing the way browsers process resources. Removing unused code or using shorter variable and function names will make a considerable difference to your site speed.
CSS, Javascript, and HTML files can be reduced with the help of tools: CSSNano, HTML Minifier, Uglify JS, and Closure Compiler.
These tools help you optimize your code and, eventually, increase your page speed. CSSNano and Uglify JS are two of Google’s recommended tools.
5. Enable GZIP compression
GZIP refers to compression of files for faster network transfer. Simply put; the smaller your files, the faster your web pages will load.
Enabling GZIP compression is a recommended practice to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files.
GZIP is an application that compresses files and makes them smaller. It works with HTML and CSS since these files often contain whitespace and repeated code.
Enabling GZIP compression can reduce download time by about 70%. It’s a great technique to speed up WordPress.
As far as image files are concerned, compress them with applications like Photoshop to maintain the quality.
6. Compress images for fast loading
Speed is the name of the game when it comes to website performance. You can’t just add some heavy images without compressing them.
If your site looks visually appealing but takes more than 3 seconds to load, those high-resolution images will not be of any use.
Too many images can also take up all the page space. So, be sure your image files are in the right format and not larger than they need to be.
7. Remove render-blocking JavaScript
JavaScript is great as it helps you add attractive visual elements and improves the design of your website. At the same time, it can be a massive time hog.
Therefore, it’s important to remove render-blocking JavaScript. Here is how you can get it done:
- Identify the offending JavaScript
- Make the scripts inlined or defer it
- Decide where to move it
- Move the script and publish your changes
Speed up WordPress – Conclusion
We hope you have found these 7 Quick Ways to Speed up Your WordPress Website helpful. Having a fast website has never been as critical as it is today.
If your WordPress website is painfully slow to load, try these quick ways to speed it up.
Reducing your page load times to less than 3 seconds can be a challenging task, but it will have a great impact on your overall website performance and conversion.
Join The Logo Community
If you would like more personal tips, advice, insights, and access to our community threads and other goodies join me in our community. You can comment directly on posts and have a discussion.
