There are two big reasons for ensuring that the pages on your WordPress website load quickly. The first of these is search engine optimization. In July 2018, Google came out with its Speed Update. While this particular update improved the ranking of sites that deliver faster page-loading speeds to mobile users, previous ones had already valued fast-loading pages overall.
The other major consideration for addressing your WordPress site speed optimization is bounce rates. This is the percentage of people who abandon your website either immediately or after only looking at one page. Page loading speeds are a major factor in this since a website taking more than two seconds to load will cause nearly half of the visitors to leave immediately. Now that you know how important a fast WordPress website is, we’ll get into some tips for speeding yours up.
Use a Simple WordPress Theme and Framework
The K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid) philosophy applies to anyone wanting to speed up the pages of their website. Try to steer clear of any themes or designs that have all sorts of extras you may not even need but that might take longer to load. These could include dynamic elements such as widgets or sliders. You might want to stick with a default WordPress theme since these tend to be simpler.
Optimize Your Images
When it comes to page load times, images on a webpage are one of the biggest culprits. Sometimes, you can’t help having a fair number of images on a given page. Maybe you have an e-commerce site, and it’s a product page, so you need pictures of the products. If you have a lot of products, you could try segmenting your offerings into different categories, so you don’t have as many listed on a given page.
Another step to take is to make sure the images are no bigger than they need to be for the customer to get a good look at the item. Provide all the angles they need to get a good look at it and no more. Also, use an image compression program to reduce the size of the image file even further, so each one will load quicker.
Keep Plugins to a Minimum
One of the greatest features of the WordPress platform is its incredible expandability through the thousands of plugins available for it. Whatever possible need just about any web developer will have for their WordPress site, there will be a plugin for it. This does have its downsides though. Every one of these takes some time to load, and too many will add too much of a burden to page load time. Make sure you only have those you really need.
Use Caching to Speed the Delivery of Your Webpages
Caching is a simple concept that can dramatically speed up your website. Basically, after a page is requested by someone once from your server, it then gets cached into memory and is brought up much more quickly the next time someone loads that same page. There are WordPress plugins that help you automatically setup such caching. I know our previous tip suggested you minimize plugins since they can add overhead to your website, but a good caching plugin is one that’s definitely worth it.
Consider Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN serves the purpose of effectively bringing the data on your website closer to many users’ geographic location through widely distributed proxy servers. The closer a server is to the end-user the faster they should get the data from it. The difference in loading speed may not be great, but this is simply one more technique that, when combined with the others here, will help you increase WordPress site speed.
Get High-Quality Hosting for Your Website
Web hosting is a critical component when it comes to the speed at which your webpages load. You can have a simple page design, all of your code perfectly optimized, your graphics compressed and everything else just right, but if the cloud hosting server is slow, your pages will still load slowly.
Solving Your Speed Issues
The above steps may not be all-inclusive of what could be slowing down your WordPress website, but they are a good place to start. Along with SEO-friendly content that engages visitors and drives conversions, a fast-loading website will keep you from losing prospective customers by reducing bounce rates and getting the search engines to take your site seriously.
About the Author
Maryn Mcdonnell is a creative content writer. She spends her days working closely with many entrepreneurs and creative thinkers from various companies including VPS HiSpeed, a virtual server company hosted which provides WordPress hosting and cloud server in Thailand, Her interests include travel, self-improvement, and technology.
