Convincing visitors to stay on your website is a pretty challenging task. You just have a couple of seconds to get hold of them. That’s when you can either make it or break it.
If your website is taking too long to load, sorry pals but you’re in serious trouble.
According to statistics, around 47% visitors expect a site to load within at least 2 seconds. If your site loads for more than 2 seconds load, around 40% of them will close the tab.
Therefore,it’s highly recommended during the website audit process, take your page loading speed into consideration and determine how you can improve it.
You’ll find plenty of free and premium site audit tools like Site Analyzer, SEMrush, AHREFS, to name a few. If you’re a WordPress user, that’s great because you can use all these tools to obtain comprehensive insights of your site.
Moreover page loading speed effects bonus rate of your site. One of the reasons for the increase in bounce rate might be slow page loading speed. From website traffic to ROI, everything is affected by it.
Therefore, it’s highly necessary to speed up your WordPress site to avoid severe consequences.
Now you know why WordPress users should speed up their site. Keep reading this article to know how you can speed up your WordPress website.
4 incredible ways speed up Your WordPress website to the next level
The good news is there are plenty of ways to speed up your WordPress website and improve your overall performance.
Choosing quality web hosting provider
When a visitor lands on your website, their browser sends an access request to your web hosting server. Your server takes time to respond to the request. The time taken to respond by your server also determines the waiting time.
Therefore when you’re choosing a web hosting server for your site, you need to take a few things into consideration such as storage and bandwidth. Moreover, you also need to ensure the hosting plan you’re choosing is capable of fulfilling your basic requirements.
You’ll come across four hosting options including, shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, and managed WP hosting.
Your hosting plan massively affects your website. For instance, if you choose a shared hosting service then you have to share the server resources with other websites and at the end of the day your website will be compromised.
That’s why we always recommend choosing a WordPress optimized hosting provider to improve the speed and overall performance of your site.
Compressing images on WordPress
Image optimization is essential because it massively affects the overall performance of your site.
Website owners add images on their site to make it visually more appealing. However, if you upload large size images on your site, it will take plenty of time to load which will also affect the page loading speed of your site.
For this reason, we suggest you optimize all the media files like images before uploading them on your site. The process of image optimization is to decrease the size of the image without compromising on the quality of image.
You can do it in two ways, either by using photo editing software or image compression plugins. The choice is yours.
One of the most practiced styles is to use photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo to edit the images. However, if you’re not a technoid, simply go to the plugins directory of WordPress and install any image optimization plugin.
There are plenty of them available. Some of the most reputable ones are,
- EWWW Image Optimizer
- WP Smush
- ShortPixel Image Optimizer
- Compress JPEG & PNG Images
- Optimus – WordPress Image Optimizer
A piece of advice – before using any image optimization plugin make sure to check whether it optimizes images on an external server or not. As it also helps you to improve the speed of your site when images are optimized on an external server.
Using speed optimized WordPress themes
There are hundreds of thousands of enticing and impressive-looking WordPress themes available, but when you’re choosing a theme for your website ensure its well-optimized and well-coded.
At times, the most striking themes are poorly coded which adversely affect the page loading speed of your site. These types of themes usually require more files to load which slow downs the overall speed of your site.
Therefore, we strongly recommend WordPress users to choose well-optimized and light-weighted themes. Select a theme that has only those features that you require. A theme bloated with features might seem tempting but all they do is slow down your page loading speed.
There are plenty of free and premium WordPress themes available in the marketplace. However, if you’re getting one from a third-party marketplace then make sure it’s a trustworthy and reputable one.
Using quality WordPress plugins
Adding WordPress plugins allows you to add more advanced functionalities to your site. But unfortunately, most of the WordPress users are unaware of this fact that plugins also affect the page loading speed of your site.
When you make a site access request, WordPress first loads all the core components then plugins. To load on site, plugins make database calls on the site’s backend which increase the page loading time of your site.
With each new request, the page loading speed slows down. Therefore, we strongly discourage users to avoid installing unnecessary plugins on their site. Also use high-quality, well-coded plugins.
Finding a well-coded plugin in the market is just like finding a needle in a haystack. That’s why I do a thorough background check.
Conclusion
From hosting servers to plugins, literally everything affects page loading speed of your WordPress guide. We hope this precise guide will help you to improve the speed and overall performance of your WordPress website.