How to Improve Your WordPress Site Performance
Boosting your website’s speed is the ultimate goal for any WordPress user. Ideally, your users can browse your website quickly and easily. But various factors can slow your WordPress site’s page-load time, including web hosting and SEO.
Accelerating your WordPress website enhances how users interact with your digital presence. Over 53% of users leave websites that take more than three seconds to load.
If you’re having difficulty optimizing your WordPress site, don’t worry. There are multiple online tools, tips, and tricks to help boost your webpage performance. Let’s take a look at some recent ones to help you optimize your WordPress site.
Why Is Speed Important For My WordPress Site?
Research has revealed that the average human attention span has decreased from 12 seconds to 7 seconds. How does this relate to you as a website owner? The correlation is simple.
A user will click away from your website if it requires long loading times. You have, at most, three seconds to show your content.
Recently, the StrangeLoop Case Study audited Google, Amazon, and other web-giants. Researchers found that a one-second delay in page load could reduce conversions by 7%, a 16% drop-off in customers’ interest, and an 11% decline in page views. To make matters worse, Google and other search engines don’t optimize websites that require considerable loading times. This means that sites with longer loading times will have difficulty generating organic traffic.
If you want more traffic to your website, or simply more revenue, you need to make your WordPress website faster!
How to Test and Analyze Your WordPress Loading Time
There are many tools and platforms available to test your loading times. We recommend looking into the following services, and choosing the one that works best for you:
Google Pagespeed Insights
- Gt matrix Tool
- Pingdom Tool
- Web Page Test
In a matter of seconds, these tools produce data that can help you take action and speed up your WordPress site. If you’re just getting started with WordPress, don’t assume that if your site loads, then the speed is acceptable. There are many factors involved in page loading, and these tools will allow you to see how your users interact with your site display times.
3 Easy Tips for Speeding up Your WordPress Website
Get Help from Your Cloud Hosting Provider
Before you do anything to speed up your WordPress website, it is strongly recommended that you ask your WordPress Hosting Provider for help. They’re expertise and familiarity with the platform can be an invaluable resource for improving your WordPress website.
Install an Efficient Caching Plugin
Another helpful tool to increase website performance is a cache plugin. Using a caching plugin boosts your site’s efficiency by serving visitors a quickly loading version of your site. Using a caching plugin doesn’t require your WordPress script to regenerate for users each visit. This bloated PHP data may incorporate CSS code, HTML, Flash files, images, JS and fonts, and slow load times.
Optimize Your Visuals and Images
Images not only give life to your website but also boost engagement. Research shows that striking visuals make your content literally eye-catching. In fact, 80% of readers are more likely to linger on your blog posts and content when paired with appealing visuals.
However, if you don’t pay attention to image optimization, it could hurt your website. Non-optimized images are one of the most significant speed issues for any WordPress user.
Keep the following things in mind:
- Use Cdn for images
- Reduce https requests
- Use lazy loading
- Reduce page size
Pro Tip: Instead of uploading a picture directly from your photo gallery, it is strongly recommended to use photo editing software optimized to your web page’s latest requirements. Photo editors can compress image sizes by up to 5x.
Best Practices for Optimizing Your WordPress Performance
After installing a caching plugin and optimizing your images, you’ll see significant improvements across your website. If you want to improve your website performance like a pro, follow the practices mentioned below. Surprisingly, many of these practices are non-technical and can be implemented quickly without spending additional effort or time.
Frequently Update Your WordPress Website
For the best performance update your WordPress site as often as possible. Updating WordPress to the latest version not only gives you the latest features, it fixes bugs and other issues too. There’s a strong probability that your WordPress themes and plugins need to be updated too.
As a WordPress owner, it is your responsibility to update frequently. Keep your WordPress website, plugin, themes, and caches up to date. If you ignore the updates, your website can become unstable, and leave you defenseless to security threats.
Compress Your Wordpress Website’s Size
A compressed website will load faster with less bandwidth, and there are multiple ways to do this. For one, you can use GZip compression to compress the size of your website up to 70%.
An uncompressed website, on the other hand, takes much longer to load. No one wants to watch paint dry, or waste their time waiting for your website to load.
So, if you’re launching a new website, it is strongly recommended to compress its size according to the latest requirements.
Choose a Lightweight Theme
While the WordPress marketplace is full of amazing themes, remember that themes with multiple sliders, dynamic content, widgets, and sidebars can cause hosting servers to respond slowly. If you’re just starting out, choose a lightweight theme for the best performance.
Wrapping-Up
We hope the tips mentioned here help! And don’t forget to analyze your WordPress site performance after their implementation. We’re sure that after applying a few of these best practices, you will experience a significant boost in your WordPress site performance.
Any tips or tricks we missed, or strategies you’ve learned while building your WordPress site? Let us know in the comments below, and follow us on social media for more WordPress insights.
