Website loading time is crucial in determining whether visitors will stay on your website or abandon it.
Users are often in a hurry to get answers to their queries and may leave if it takes too long for a site to load.
Furthermore, you should pay attention to your page speed load on mobile devices, as Google uses this version for indexing and ranking.
Therefore, optimizing your site’s loading time for a better user experience is essential.
How To Check Your Website Page Load Speed
There is an easy way to check the speed of your website, and that is by using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.
This tool measures your site’s front-end performance and offers suggestions for improving it.
Now go to the PageSpeed Insights tool and type your website URL into the box.
Then click analyze.
The result will show the link load times for your home page, mobile site, and desktop site.
Ensure you pay attention to the issues highlighted and fix them as recommended.
Here are other tools to check your website speed and performance
Do Website Hosting Affect Site Speed?
Website hosting is as important as site design and Content. The hosting service provider should be reliable, offer a wide variety of features to suit all needs, and have a secure server.
Hence, a fast-loading website will improve SEO ranking, increase conversion rates, and improve customer retention and loyalty.
There are many web hosting services out there; Wealthy Affiliate Bluehost. AccuWeb Hosting, Siteground, etc. I use Wealthy Affiliate and it has been a smooth journey so far.
Why Should You Speed Up Your WordPress Site?
Speed is an essential factor for websites, and there are many reasons you need to focus on it.
The average human attention span is roughly 8 seconds, and they will leave if the website takes more than 3 seconds to load. Hence, your website needs to load fast because people get impatient when waiting for a page or app to load.
Though Google says the speed update will not affect a fast site, only slow ones. But, we have witnessed fast-loading websites getting better results.
Furthermore, almost 60% of web browsing sessions are abandoned after just 20 seconds of waiting.
So, websites need to quickly retain their visitors and keep them coming back for more.
25 Simple Ways To Improve Your WordPress Site Speed
1. Install a WordPress Caching Plugin
The need for a WordPress caching plugin is to improve website speed. Caching saves a lot of time by loading content from a local file instead of going to the remote server. This process is beneficial for websites with heavy traffic.
When a user requests a page, the browser can quickly load it from the cache instead of checking with the server.
This technique can be applied to repeat visits to a website. Whenever you visit a website for the first time, the Content is sent and stored in your browser’s cache.
If you revisit that site, it will be delivered from your browser’s cache instead of the hosted server, making the page load faster.
Many WordPress caching plugins are out there, but not all of them function well.
It is essential to know the best caching plugins for WordPress before installing one on your site so you can enjoy improved website speed.
2. Use A Powerful CDN Network
A CDN is a system of servers set up to deliver Content on behalf of the website owner. The CDN directs requests to one or more “points” close to the user, maximizing download speeds.
Imagine an internet connection that is less than perfect. When someone visits your website, they use this connection and experience slow loading times or even outages.
However, if you have to host in multiple locations, your site will automatically route the request to the best possible connection.
This way, your visitors won’t know about your site’s shortcomings, and it will load quickly for them.
CDNs are available for all kinds of hosting services – cloud-based, colocation, and dedicated hosting – so you can benefit from their services no matter what type of server you use.
3. Use A Good Web Hosting Provider
The web hosting provider is the most important aspect of your website. Good hosting providers make it easy to create a website and ensure that it is available to everyone in a reliable way.
When looking for a quality hosting provider, good uptime is one of the most important things you should look for.
Uptime refers to how often the server goes offline and is inaccessible to visitors on your site.
For example, a hosting company with 99% uptime is better than one with 95% uptime because it means there are only about two hours per year when your website might be inaccessible.
In addition, you should consider the server location that best suits your needs as that has a significant impact on the site speed.
4. Choose A Light WordPress Theme
When you choose a lightweight theme, you make your website’s code more efficient. In addition, it means that the Content of your website will load faster on mobile devices.
What makes a lightweight theme?
The answer is simple – it is just a shortcut to writing efficient code for your site. When you have more than one page of Content, this will impact the loading speed of each page.
So, choosing a lightweight theme can help your website load fast on mobile devices and desktops, which is essential for businesses that want to increase conversion rates or reach more people online.
5. Combine Scripts And Stylesheets
Combining scripts and stylesheets can help to reduce the number of domain lookups.
After the file has been downloaded to the client’s computer, it is unnecessary to download it again as this decreases load time for your page significantly.
6. Enable GZIP compression
GZIP compression is a standard compression algorithm for data, which reduces the number of bytes in a file by detecting redundancy.
As a result, the method reduces the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files in a web browser – and can improve load times.
7. Eliminate render-blocking In above-the-fold Content
A common mistake that web developers make is to add JavaScript and CSS files in the head of the page, which blocks rendering Content. Instead, add these files in the footer or add a defer attribute to scripts and styles.
8. Minify CSS, HTML & JavaScript files
Minifying cascade style sheets, HTML, and JavaScript files (henceforth called CSS, HTML, and JS) reduces the size of these files by removing unnecessary whitespace and characters like newlines, spaces, comments, etc.
Minification makes the website load faster as there are fewer bytes to download. It also helps in debugging as it’s easy to see errors because the file sizes are small.
HTML and JS files can be minified using tools like YUI Compressor or Closure Compiler or by hand.
9. Split Comment pages
If you have any comments on your website, break them into pages.
10. Reduce External HTTP Requests
Reduce the number of HTTP requests to your website by merging multiple scripts into single files.
When you visit a website, your browser makes several requests to load different pieces of the site’s Content. If there are many scripts on the page, this can make for slow loading times or even cause your browser to crash. You can reduce these HTTP requests by merging all the scripts on the page into one file.
Some common web technologies often used today are JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
While these web technologies have their own benefits and drawbacks, they each affect how your site loads in a browser.
One of these effects is that sometimes they will create more HTTP requests than necessary for your page to load, which causes slow loading times or even crashes in some browsers.
11. Speculative Preloading of above-the-fold Content
As a website owner, you’re always striving to balance the need for speed with the need for a quality browsing experience. With Preloading, you can satisfy both needs.
Preloading content shown above the fold allows for faster load times and a better user experience.
12. Optimize Your Images
One of the most common reasons for a slow website is large images. Hence, optimizing and compressing them to the smallest size is vital.
There are many ways to optimize images for the web. For example, you can use an online tool like Tinypng, which shrinks the image without losing its quality. Or do so directly from your site with plugins like Smush, Shortpixel.
In addition, you can crop, edit and reduce image size with ease using tools like Photoshop, Canva.
13. Turn off TrackBacks and Ping Backs
Trackbacks and pingbacks are a major nuisance when it comes to writing. It would be best to be careful that you don’t inadvertently trackback or pingback on your own blog post, leading to some embarrassing situations. Therefore, it’s best to turn them off for your own sake.
14. Optimize WordPress Database
WordPress is a powerful CMS, but it’s also susceptible to the server’s performance on which it runs.
One of the main things that impact WordPress performance is the size of your WordPress database.
They are full of unused, obsolete data. This information is cluttering up memory space and slowing down your WordPress website. It can also cause your site to crash if the database grows too large.
There are many ways to optimize your WordPress database, and some are more complicated than others. The easiest way is to clear the cache in your browser. Clearing your browser cache can make a huge difference in WordPress performance.
16. Update Your Website PHP
This resource is powered by a powerful and fast web host that can handle your content needs.
There are many web hosting companies to choose from, but not all of them will give you the performance and reliability that you’re looking for.
17. Reduce The Number of Plugins On-Site
A website is only as good as its plugins. There are many of them available for free on the internet, but not all are high-quality.
So, a website with too many plugins can experience crashes and malfunctions, which can be problematic for both the site owner and the visitor.
Therefore, remove unused plugins and update relevant ones regularly.
Always run Google PageSpeed test before and after installing a plugin, so you know if it contributes to your site loading speed.
18. Optimize For Mobile
Google prioritized site speed as a ranking factor for the mobile view.
Therefore, using a responsive WordPress theme is vital.
19. Don’t upload Videos Directly To Your Website
Uploading videos to your website is not the most effective method of uploading. Instead, you can upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo. When you upload the video, select the option ‘Embed’ in the coding box instead of using a direct link.
This will make it easier for people to view your videos on their own website or blog post.
20. Reduce the file sizes on your website
Smaller file sizes are more appealing for readers. For this reason, you should use a lighter or simpler design to reduce your file size, which will make your website faster.
In addition, optimize the images on your site by choosing appropriate dimensions and compression settings. Also, be sure to specify image formats suitable for web use, such as PNG, JPEG, GIF.
21. Clean up your WordPress database
A WordPress database stores a lot of information about your site, starting from plugin settings to theme details.
Over time, it can get cluttered with junk data, and your site’s performance will suffer.
22. Reduce the number of times you edit post
Editing is time-consuming and tedious but necessary to ensure that your Content is engaging and error-free. However, writing too many words to edit may lead to writer’s block.
If you find yourself editing more than five times, you should consider re-thinking how long your posts should be.
Sometimes people are too much in love with their own Content that they keep modifying it.
Here are some tips to help you limit revisions:
– Create a plan before writing the Content, but make sure to leave room for flexibility.
– Keep deadlines realistic and achievable. The more time you allow, the more revisions you will need to do.
– Ask yourself if each revision is adding value or not – try to ask others (friends, family) for feedback.
– Try to review your work with a fresh mind and don’t rely on your first impressions of what you wrote
23. Avoid Uploading Videos Directly
Rather than uploading videos straight away to your website. That impacts your page speed.
24. Use Lazy Loading When Needed
Lazy loading is a way of loading images, scripts, stylesheets, videos, and other media files in a webpage or an application without slowing down the loading process. Lazy loading only fetches the required resources when they are visible to the user on-screen.
The main reason for this technique is to reduce bandwidth usage by only downloading the Content that will be seen by the user on-screen rather than everything. It also reduces page load times while improving performance.
25. Avoid Displaying Ads That Slow Your Page
Online ads can slow down your page and frustrate your audience. Displaying them is a bad idea, and the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) recommends against it.
Conclusion
Users on the website are not ready to wait for a site that takes up to 10 seconds to load.
Thus improving your site page load speed is important to boost traffic, reduce bounce rate, and increase conversion.
I hope you find the tips helpful.
Thank you for reading!
And if you have any questions, please drop them in the comments.
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In addition, if you would like to start your own online business that converts, this is the most valuable training you need this year.
muslimah@introbusinesses.com