Website page speed is considered one of the most important ranking factors and Google 2021 Page Experience Update clarified that site speed affects the overall performance.
Think of it as if your site is looking great and appeals to the visitor but it takes time to load. It frustrates the users and makes them leave the site immediately. It also signals the Google search engine and it directs the traffic to another site.
That is why having a fast-loading website is very important for the success of your site. Fast-load sites enhance the user experience, improve the WordPress SEO, and leave the customer satisfied.
Sadly, WordPress does not always provide you with a roller coaster website. But you don’t have to worry because optimizing the WordPress site speed is straightforward and delivers incredible results.
In this article, I’ll take through each step one by one and show you the effective ways to speed up your WordPress site.
Why Site Speed Matters (More Than You Think):
Did you know that only a 1 percent delay can increase the bounce rate by 32 percent? It negatively affects the user experience, and site traffic which results in losing potential leads. Improving the speed score must be your top priority when you are doing technical SEO.
A study by Walmart showed that improving the site’s speed by only one second, increased the conversion by 2 percent.
According to another statistic by Web FX, 83 percent of online users expect websites to load in less than three seconds.
This makes complete sense. We all come to the point where we leave the site with great disappointment due to slow loading. It also greatly hurts your bottom line.
Humans have very short attention about 8.5 seconds and they hop onto other sites if you don’t catch them in this time.
This shows that every second matters when it comes to improving user experience and making your site the hit option for people.
Website Speed Up Checklist:
Test Your Site Speed:
Before going to fix the speed, take a step back and run a performance test. Check at what position your website stands.
There are many factors site speed depends on the strength of the internet connection, the server response time, and catch optimization.
To make sure that every factor that might be affecting your site speed is optimized. You have to run a page speed test.
The good news is there are many online tools available that will help to boost your site speed and enhance user experience.
Note: I would suggest testing your site speed through at least 2 to 3 online speed checkers because every tool has its metrics to evaluate.
List of 10 Website Speed Checkers:
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- WebPage Test
- CT Metrix
- Pingdom
- Uptrends
- Website Speed Test
- Sematext
- DareBoost
- SpeedCurve
- New Relic
Core Web Vitals:
Core web vitals are the essential metrics of site performance used by Google for ranking algorithms.
User experience is the most important thing for every website and affects the overall performance of your site. Google Master includes the page experience as a ranking factor and takes it as an important indicator.
There are three main metrics included in core web vitals and you have to optimize it for fast site speed performance.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – check out the page loading time, in short, your site speed score. To provide a positive user experience optimize your site to score 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – measure how much time your site takes to respond after user interaction, such as clicking on a link or pressing a button. The sweet spot for this is less than 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – measures the page stability when its load and visual experience. Ensure that every page of your site hits the CLS score of 0.1 or less.
After understanding these metrics you can optimize and compare your website performance with standard website core web vitals in Google Search Console.
Choosing a Good Hosting Provider:
Web hosting is the most fundamental yet essential investment for website visibility. Websites with quality hosting are more visible on search engines than others.
Before choosing a web hosting identify and understand the needs of your website. Some important factors to consider are:
- Define the purpose of your site whether it’s a personal blog, business site, or maybe for as a freelancer you want to give services.
- Find a fast web server to speed up your website that gives a positive response to your visitors.
- Estimate the overall bandwidth and other features especially the WordPress features necessary for the smooth working of your site.
- Create a budget for hosting.
- Find the site that provides you with potential resources to generate traffic.
- Consider the scalability of the web to build and grow on a large scale.
Usually, there are a variety of hosting types but you have to use the best for your WordPress site.
Shared Hosting– is the hosting provider that gives hosting to more than one site. Simply put the website is sharing a server with more than one site.
Cloud Hosting is a pool of web servers that provides dedicated hosting that makes quick changes.
Dedicated Hosting- is the premium level hosting that provides you with high-level resources with complete control. It is connected to only one physical server.
WordPress Hosting- specially designed WordPress hosting service that is fully optimized for the unique features of WordPress. It is specifically hosted by the WordPress control management system.
VPS Hosting: stands for virtual private server. It hosts many sites at a time, but every site has its private server dedicated only to them. Typically it potentially increases the site traffic.
Consider the above factors and choose the hosting that suits you the best according to your site requirements and budget.
Choose Server That is Closet To Your Location:
Why does the location of the server matter? The geolocation of the server is the second important thing that affects the performance and response time of your website.
Servers close to your targeted audience lead to faster page load and reduce the chances of latency. Whereas the farther servers lead to slower page load and ultimately a bad user experience.
According to a study, 47 percent of users expect a website to load in no more than two seconds. Every second delay after that hurts the user values and affects them negatively.
That’s why the placement of the server is important to consider while choosing the hosting and aims to enhance the user experience.
Update Your WordPress Version:
Update your WordPress website for a newer version to enhance the speed and user experience. Update usually provides you with many different but a bunch of quality features.
WordPress 6. 5. 2 released on April 2, 2024, introduces Fonts Library, data view, efficient memory management, and improves the control site.
Simply put, it is good for your site to update when a new version comes but you have to be very cautious about it. Track the performance after updating whether your site is working smoothly or causes any issues on both user and server ends.
The best way is to conduct a thorough website audit to ensure your website runs as intended.
In case you don’t know how to conduct a website audit to speed up your site click on it.
Use Caching Plugins:
As you are aiming to speed up your WordPress site don’t forget about the cache plugins.
A caching plugin is also known as temporary storage of your site where all the frequently accessed data is stored. It helps in fast retrieving the data, so every time you don’t need to go back to the main server for data.
In short, it makes it easy for returning users to access your website data faster and boosts your site performance.
This helps to reduce the time to fetch the data from the server and transfer it to the user’s browser. It could take a long time, especially for large websites. You can eliminate these steps by using the cache plugin. In this way, you can rely on it to do this work and make your web page load with the speed of light.
Additional benefits include increased conversions, optimizing the SEO and performance, enhance the user experience, especially for mobile users.
I strongly recommend spending your time selecting the best cache plugin. Here is the list of top cache plugins:
- Hummingbird
- Nitro Pack
- LiteSpeed
- WP Rocket
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Super Cache
- WP Fastest Cache
- SiteGround Optimizer
- Cache Enabler
Optimize and Compress the Images:
Optimization of images is the most overlooked factor. Large-size images have a very bad effect on the page load time. Usually, large files take a long time to load as compared to compressed ones. This makes the user frustrated because most of the time people believe that images bring color to your content.
Optimization of images refers to reducing the size and decreasing the downloading time to 2 seconds to speed up your page load.
Before uploading images make sure to optimize your images, choose the right format JPEG, PNG, and WebP (the most popular format offers greater resolution and compression than JPEG and PNG), and use JAVAScript and HTML to prevent lazy loading.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN):
A CDN is a group of networks that stores your website information so whenever the user requests it redirects it to the nearest server and responds immediately.
The websites targeting global audiences must consider CDN to deliver content potential faster by shortening the distance and making it easy for users to access data.
It also provides you with additional security, scalability, and broad coverage.
The cost of CDN varies depending on bandwidth, region reach, etc. The list of the top CDNs are:
- Cloudflare
- Akamai
- Bunny.net
- Cucuri
- KeyCDN
- RocketCDN
- Impreva
- Amazon CloudFront
Use Light and Fast Theme:
Heavy themes with a lot of data including images, headers, footers page layouts, and other features slow down your website.
Themes are the same whether it’s a WordPress theme or other it works in the same way. However, some themes are more efficient than others due to their coding.
If you are a WordPress user you tried and tested many themes one thing to notice is how they look when comes to the user end. Because your website theme makes the first impression.
Finding the theme with the best-updated features and hosting is essential. Some factors to consider while choosing a theme are:
- Responsive and mobile friendliness design
- Understand your target audience’s psychology
- Customization Options
- Coding and SEO structure
- Speed and Performance (Most important)
Minify and Compress the Files:
When it comes to on-page SEO of your website, file size is the essential factor to consider. Your performance depends greatly on it.
Large-size files have a detrimental effect on the performance of your site.
Larger Files = longer load time.
When you compress and reduce the file size in kilobytes and megabytes you are making it easily accessible for users. It reduces the time of transferring your content from the main server to the user end.
That’s why reducing the size of files (CSS and Java Script) is important for the smooth running and functionality of your website.
You can also compress the GIZZ compression, reducing the spaces between coding, adding many files to make one file and many other ways can be used to compress it.
Use Lazy Loading Your Content:
Lazy loading is a technique that renders certain parts of your webpage to load especially images and videos.
When you implement this technique instead of loading your all data at once, it only loads images that are shown on the user’s browser at that time. It’s not only applicable for images but also for other media.
This type of loading is called “lazy”. It helps to speed up your website and enhance the user experience.
Optimize the Word Press Database:
A database is a set of all the information content, images, videos, and infographics are stored. Sometimes when you don’t clean the database of your website it fills with too much unessential information like deactivated plugin settings, old comments, duplicate posts, etc.
So whenever a user request comes for specific data it becomes difficult for the server to find and ultimately take a longer time.
Audit and optimize your database to remove all the unnecessary information. This way you enhance the performance the response time of your site.
You can use plugins like WP-Sweep Plugin to manage your database easily and prevent from bloating of your site database.
Install a WordPress Caching Plugins:
WordPress cache plugins are best for improving your overall site performance. The language used and run on the hosting server is PHP used mainly by WordPress.
You can use a caching plugin depending on the hosting type to overcome the load on web hosting.
Caching can significantly improve the load speed, user experience, and SEO site ranking by reducing the server load.
However, some hosting provides you with caching plugins so you don’t need to install them separately.
Note: Using multiple caching plugins, make sure they all are not doing things the same at a time otherwise it leads to potential issues. However, only one cache plugin is good to go.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Is WordPress free to use?
Yes, WordPress is free to use along with its all benefits and features. Only you have to invest in a hosting plan setting to improve your website performance.
How you can identify the issues that slow down your website?
Well, it is pretty difficult to pinpoint what’s wrong and which factor is responsible, but you can use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to do this for you.
How can I speed up my WordPress website?
By implementing the above-mentioned techniques you can speed up your site potentially. Here is the list of these tips and techniques:
- Invest in better hosting
- Update your PHP
- Use caching plugins
- Use a fast and light theme
- Minify and compress CSS and HTML
- Cleanup your database
- Optimize and compress the images
- Use CDN
Will it slow down if I install too many plugins?
Yes, sometimes after installing more than 2 plugins it affects heavily on the performance of your site. But the problem is not with the number of plugins you install instead with the function, quality, and size of the plugins. That’s why you have to check the history of each plugin you install carefully.
Wrapping Up:
Who does not love speedy sites? Speed and user experience have been the important components for ranking. After Google PageExperience update it becomes critical to optimize both to rank high on search engines.
Website speed directly affects the credibility, bounce rate, and conversions. To improve it effectively you need to identify all the common issues to solve and then go for targeting Big Mouths.
We hope this article helped you to learn how to speed up your WordPress site by following just 12 easy techniques.
Go ahead and try these techniques out to boost your WordPress performance. If you like this article then please share it with your friends to read these best tips and benefited.
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Have you ever conducted a site speed audit? What were the issues you find and how did you solve them?