Everyone hates technique hitches or worse slow WordPress, and that’s why mobile development keeps evolving to enhance technology.
A research that was done by Kissmetrics showed 47% of web visitors expect a website to load in two seconds or less.
40% will leave when loading takes more than three seconds.
When you build a website, the key is to entice customers. You may have a few seconds to capture people’s attention and convince them to spend more time there.
Why is it Important to Speed up your WordPress Website?
A report done by the Microsoft Bing search team showed that a two-second longer delay in responding to your page, reduced user satisfaction by 3.8%. While it increased lost revenue of 4.3% per user and reduced clicks by 4.3%, that’s how crucial it is for your site speed, especially if you are targeting the global audience.
Even Google, in its ranking algorithm, are including site speed, which affects SEO. You can’t afford to lose visitors and reduce rankings in Search Engines. If you have a sluggish website, you can improve your position in SERP and prioritize to improve WordPress speed with some of the ways shown below:
Best Ways to speed up WordPress
Solid Framework/Theme: Avoid bloated framework that has tons of features that slow your site to a crawl. Invest in good themes like the 2019 Theme that comes as a lightweight and quite speedy for your WordPress. There may be others like Genesis Theme Framework or Divi the most popular WordPress Theme that do the same job and many more.
Good Host: As a start, you may find a shared host to be a bargain. Nevertheless, it has a flipside of slowness during high traffic time. If you’re targeting big stuff, then running word press on a shared host may kill your business. However, do research and invest in a credible host.
As a beginner, You can start with SiteGround WordPress Hosting, They are offering affordable hosting plans for small and large scale WordPress sites.
WP Engine is a very popular managed WordPress hosting provider, they are offering all the tools you need to manage small and large scale WordPress sites from a single Dashboard. You will get access to 35+ premium StudioPress themes including Genesis Framework for WordPress. You can use all these themes on unlimited sites, it means no need to pay extra for premium WordPress themes and multiple licenses.
WP Engine also has a Premium Page builder plugin Atomic Blocks Pro, an easy to use page builder plugin to create different types of websites without learning to code.
ATOMIC BLOCKS PRO plugin is available for all WP Engine Users, Including 35+ Premium StudioPress Themes and Genesis Framework.
Content Delivery Network: If you are marketing using WordPress, you will love the CDN. Prominent bloggers like Copy bloggers are utilizing them.
The content delivery network takes your static files from your site and lets your visitors access them by downloading them as fast as possible. Also, there is a plugin that promises to do the same called Free-CDN, which you can as well try.
CloudFlare has free plan and a plugin for WordPress. If you are not using SSL, Cloudflare also offers free SSL certificate yo your site.
Optimizing your WordPress Database: There are several plugins known that optimize your database. Popular ones are; WP-Optimize and WP-DB Manager, which can schedule dates for database optimization.
Adjust Gravatar Images: Setting the default image of gravatar will increase the speed of the website. Some people even disable them for everyone on their site.
Active Caching Plugin: Find an efficient plugin such as Cache-enabler that can help your page load faster as elements get cached. WordPress plugins are useful, and the best ones fall under the category of caching. The advantage of having them, they drastically improve page loading promptly.
Install SwiftPerfomance Plugin: Even as a beginner WordPress user, you can increase WordPress website speed with this plugin. You can watch the WordPress website speed difference before and after installing this plugin.
How do You Know the Loading Speed of Your Website?
For you to find out the loading time of your website, step number one is to analyze the current load time for your WP website. The speed may differ because it depends on many factors, such as:
- Page size
- The number of requests it generates
- Cached or not
- Host content type; static or dynamic
- Waterfall chart
- YSlow score
Tools to Help you Test your Website Loading Speed
There are available credible test tools that are free to test your website. Due to their unique metric, you can’t compare one tool test result with the other. Pick the right test tool.
- Pingdom: This is a free speed testing tool that is one of the top market-leading monitoring services. Maybe because it’s a super easy tool to use compared to other devices, it also displays your site’s request in a waterfall.
- GTMetrix: Best-known as a Pingdom alternative.
- Webpage Analyzer: A free tool that analyzes your site’s speed, size, and composition.
- Webpage Test: An appropriate tool for advanced users. Those who want to run the website test around the globe using real browsers like Chrome and IE.
- KeyCDN Website Speed Test: This tool runs on 14 different test locations around the globe. That can help you determine the overall download time from that physical region. Also, include a waterfall breakdown and website preview.
- DareBoost: This tool uses a premium service, but offers five free reports in a month. An all in all service that provides website analysis speed, SEO, and quality security.
- YSlow: A Yahoos page performance tool that is also free and requires installation as an add-on for your browser.
- Load Impact: It is also one of the best tools that test the scalability of your website.
- Dotcom-monitor: Has the most useful tool that allows you to instantly test your website speed of up to 25 locations around the world.
- Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tools: A tool developed and powered by Google Page Speed Insights, aimed toward marketers to deliver an optimization report that can be easily understood.
In conclusion, everyone craves a quick lightening website that is likely to attract the audience and make them stick around and ultimately convert them. You increase the speed of the website by using all the information we have covered above.