If your website was performing well before and lost its performance, it is high time to speed up your WordPress. We all know that fast-loading pages are responsible for better user experience, improved page views, and also help with SEO for the SERP.
With the analysis conducted and the studies conducted, the rate of users bouncing off the website when it loads slowly has increased by up to 47 percent. Therefore, you have a few seconds to keep your visitors on your website allowing them to understand and analyze your brand. Let’s see why speeding up the website is important.
Why is Speed Important for your WordPress Site?
1. Be it WordPress or any other website, faster loading times create a better user experience (UX) . With less time taken, users get more interest in your site.
2. Speed is a vital factor that helps in search engine rankings where Google considers website speed as a main part of their ranking algorithm. If the page loading speed is higher than the others, the chance of your page getting penalized is more.
3. The speed of your site directly impacts conversion rates. A few studies conducted have shown that even small improvements in loading times can lead to higher conversion rates.
4. A slow website can increase the bounce rate because users are more likely to abandon it before exploring further. Therefore, if the readability of the page is 4 minutes and the page loading is more than 2-3 seconds you tend to lose the users.
5. A fast site keeps users interested and encourages them to explore more content. The faster the page speed, it holds your user's interest.
6. A fast WordPress website ensures that these bots can efficiently crawl and index your pages. Hence, helps in your page ranking in search engines.
Measures to Check WordPress Speed
There are several ways to check WordPress website speed. The speed of the website may differ depending on each page present on the website. The factors in which the speed of the website matters are the size of the page, caching details, and whether it contains static or dynamic content.
Tools that can help you check your WordPress website speed
Page Speed Insights by Google: Analyzes your website's speed and provides performance scores for both mobile and desktop versions
GTMetrix: It provides a comprehensive report with performance scores.
WebPageTest: Allows you to test your site's speed from multiple locations worldwide.
Also, several WordPress plugins can help you check the speed of your site. WP Performance Score Booster, WP Super Cache, or W3 Total Cache often have WordPress built-in speed testing features opined Webomindapps - WordPress developer in Toronto.
Key factors to consider when verifying a website for speed check
- Load Time: It is the time taken by your website to load completely.
- Time to First Byte (TTFB): The time it takes for the server to respond to a request.
- Page Size: The overall size of your webpage, including all assets like images, scripts, and CSS files.
- Number of Requests: The total number of requests made to load your webpage.
What are the reasons for Websites Slowing Down?
There are multiple factors to consider to improve to speed up the WordPress website. Likewise, it becomes essential to know what slows down your WordPress website.
Basic causes for WordPress slowing down
Poor web hosting: Improper server configuration affects the website speed.
Improper WordPress configuration: This can lead to server overload, resulting in sluggish website performance or even complete crashes.
Page size and images: Unoptimized images for the website makes your WordPress slow and take too much loading time.
Plugins: Too many plugins with incomplete coding can slow down your WordPress website.
Content delivery System: With no CDN, users from far from the hosting server experience slow websites.
Other reasons lead to the slowdown of the WordPress website. Caching issues, problems with DB, security, and high traffic issues also affect the fast loading time on the website.
A Complete Guide Fix Slow WordPress Site
Here are a few methods that can help you improve your WordPress site’s speed.
Optimizing the images
Unoptimized images are the most common reason why WordPress websites load slower. The larger the image, the longer the time it takes to load. Without compromising the quality of the image you need to compress the image. You can use plugins like Smush or TinyPNG or compress them before uploading using tools like Adobe Photoshop or online image compressors.
Enable Caching
By allowing caching on your website, the website data is stored on a temporary storage enabling your website to load faster and more quickly. By doing so, your website can load faster and also increase the speed of files loading on the website. Another advantage of having cache enabled is you do not need to re-download the files as they will be present on the server.
Implement Gzip Compression
Enable Gzip compression on your server to reduce the size of your website files during transfer, leading to faster loading times. Therefore, it helps your data transfer between the server’s and user’s browsers in a lightly compressed version without having to compromise the quality of the data transferred.
Optimize CSS and JavaScript
You can optimize CSS and JavaScript files to remove unnecessary characters, spaces, and comments, reducing file sizes and improving load times. Usually, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files are used to add comments to your code. Optimizing these codes can reduce the size of the files or can delete the unimportant codes present on the website.
Minimize HTTP Requests
Minimize the number of redirects on your site as they can add extra HTTP requests and slow down the page load time. Too many plugins load all files present on the website in one go. The included files may be to read analytics of the website or to add the services like Facebook or Twitter. You can optimize these by disabling scripts and classes.
Use the latest version of PHP
PHP is a back-end scripting language on the server side. That means all the files will be executed on the server that hosts your website. It is important to keep your PHP also updated for the smooth running of WordPress as it is the language that powers it.
Update WordPress, Themes, and Plugins
Having more than one plugin does not help you have a quality WordPress website. But having one quality plugin can help you speed up your website. It is important to keep your WordPress plugins and themes up to date. It is always suggested to delete unused plugins. Too many plugins running on your website affect the performance.
Conclusion
With all the above-provided information, you will be able to improve your overall WordPress website’s performance. To improve the speed of your WordPress site, you can optimize images, use caching plugins, minify and combine CSS/JavaScript files, and other methods explained. By prioritizing speed, you can enhance user experience, boost search engine rankings, and achieve your website's goals more effectively.
