9 Ways to Improve WordPress Page Speed

This article will help you understand the importance of the speed of your WordPress website.

A user won’t wait to see your web pages and blog posts if it takes ages to load.

“Every millisecond matters.”

If loading your website takes more than 2 Seconds, a higher percentage of users will close down the tab. In an era of blazingly fast Facebook, ultra-light twitter and And Quick responding PWA you can’t afford to lose a single second.

You will also decrease your Conversion rates if you neglect to optimize the speed of your WordPress blog.

In case you don’t know, WordPress requires an excellent memory to show up if not optimized correctly, the whole load shifts to browser and server which are already doing their best over that “Slow Speed” internet.

When you start to grow more, you should start thinking about boosting your website’s speed to help you get ahead in the race. The more popular your website becomes, the more memory you will use and hence, room for optimization increases.

Google mentioned that slow sites went down and started to give better rankings to fast and secured websites. Doing so helps Google to ensure its commitment to a user-friendly search engine. Dwell time is severely affected by the overall loading time.

While Google is the search engine giant you need to focus on its guidelines while its algorithm stays a secret, various practices have acclaimed some prescribed procedures to follow in need to get high search engine rankings.

The slow website also makes a loyal reader into a part-time reader. Nothing will work accordingly if your website is slow. This will result in a high bounce rate too.

In the year 2018, it’s all about speed and responsive websites. The faster you are, the more you become famous.

As soon as you started your blog or website, your Main Goal Should be Speed and SEO. There are millions of websites, and each of them is continuously pushing up the level, but everyone isn’t going to think about speed, but you should because you want to stay on the top.

I am continually trying to increase my blog speed through the help of various tools and services and my days are focused on speeding experiments, and that’s why I want your site to be a speedy too.

I have successfully increased my website’s speed by 1.47 seconds (approx.), and I am quite happy with it.

In my new On-page SEO guide, you’ll notice responsiveness and overall performance of your pages affect SEO rankings. If your users are getting away immediately after they click on any of your links, Google’s RankBrain will notice, and you don’t want that happening.

If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load and performs poorly, you’ll lose a potential customer. The data, above shows how the rate of conversion started to decrease once the loading speed increase by just a few milliseconds.

Just by increasing the speed of your blog you can gain up to 210% increase in conversions leading to more sales, subscribers, leads, and followers.

Now that you know speed is critical, its time to optimize your blog for optimum performance. Follow the steps and use the tools from below mentioned guides:

• Top Plugins for performance optimization of WordPress
• Best Cache Plugins for WordPress Blog

Ready To know How you can Increase The Speed in WordPress?

A Fast Loading Website has:-

• Low Bounce Rate
• Higher Conversions
• Better Search Engine Rankings
• Better User Experience & Response.

So, you know now why having a fast website is all that matters.

Below are 7 steps and best practices you should take to achieve it.

Cache

“Server-side caching can drastically speed up your WordPress site.”

Caching, both on the server-side and client-side is an important part of the WordPress site performance.

Once a user loads your site for the first time, you can take advantage of browser capabilities to cache the contents of that site locally, so on the next visit, the user already has them loaded.

Similarly, on the server-side, having a caching layer works wonders for serving your site up very quickly.

The most common way to enable server-side caching with WordPress is by using the W3 Total Cache plugin. This plugin (or one similar) is needed on almost all hosts. Also, remember to leverage your browser cache.

R,ead – 4 Best Cache Plugins To Speed Up Your WordPress Blog

Plug-Ins

In An E-book by Flywheel I read –

“You don’t want to spend weeks relying on a plugin, only for it to become the bane of your site’s existence”

Plugins Drive A Functionality To your WordPress Site, and You can do almost anything with a plugin. But As I wrote before, plugins Have multiple Holes in them and they come with this hole to your WordPress blog.

A Poor Plugin MMay:

1. Slow Down Your Site
2. Make it Vulnerable
3. Disturb Functionality of other plugins

Read reviews, test them regularly, and be sure you’re updating them to the latest version when it’s available.

If there are plugins that you just can’t live without but still make your site slow, there are ways to continue using them. Generally, if you determine that a plugin is loading slowly, the next step is to talk to your hosting company to increase the memory on your server.

Never rely on a single plugin. Always try to find Alternatives and The better than the one you are using. Use a plugin Called Query Monitor that sifts through your whole site and reports back what percentage of total load time each plugin is responsible for handling.

Read – 10 Plugins to Speed Up Your WordPress Blog (With Tutorials)

Make Sure You Are with The Right Host

Web Hosts are the First step towards your website’s speed. In case you don’t know, The Speed of your website or blogs depends upon your Server and its response time. Since a server is provided to you through your web hosting, Make sure it is optimized for WordPress.

WordPress requires a good chunk of memory and static resources. When you start to add more plugins, it becomes heavier to handle. An optimized server created explicitly for WordPress uses SSD storage, higher RAM and account isolation to make up with your growing needs.

To maintain a lower loading time in WordPress, you need the host who understands the needs of its plugins, cache, and database.

I always recommend CloudWays for shared hosting, especially when you start getting good traffic to your website.

Tip – Buy an Annual plan (1 year or more) to save money because the discounted rates apply for the First Bill only, the renewal rates are higher.

Use A CDN

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) work on DNS or server level. Using a CDN helps in reducing the load on one server. CDN helps to divide traffic in different server locations reducing load time.

Using a CDN Makes your site faster with up to 2 seconds or sometimes more. I used MaxCDN and found my results to be 2.06 seconds faster on Pingdom.

Benchmark your site with testing

Before you get started and make any changes to your website, it’s essential to take some measurements and run a few tests to get some benchmarks.

This will help you know exactly where you’re at right now and make sure the changes you’re making are actually improving your site (instead of making things worse)!

To test the speed of your site, your best bet is a  combination of WebPageTest and Google PageSpeed Insights.

WebPageTest gives you a good idea of the actual time (in seconds) that a site takes to load, and these metrics will help you know whether it’s the back-end or front-end causing a website to load slowly.

Google PageSpeed Insights is best for looking at how your site is rendered by the browser and can help you identify what you can improve on the front-end.

Keep doing time to time benchmarks and keep a record and analyze your website. This will help you to progress in the long run. This habit will eventually make your website faster help you keep it up.

Image Optimization

Images are Important for your blog. Both readers and search engines enjoy articles with images.  But they Also have another Side.

Images make your page size larger than usual. Also, it increases your loading time. Try to use Lesser images. Using as few pictures as possible will make sure your web page loads smoothly.

Make sure you Smush or compress them before adding them to your article. Plugins like WPsmush helps to reduce the image size as soon as they are uploaded. Also remember to add ALT attributes to them.

Choose A Fast Theme

Your conversion and bounce rates are greatly affected by the theme you are using. It must be:-

• Seo friendly
• Fast loading
• Customizable
• Free from bloatware
• Clean coded

These are some of the good signs of a theme and are generally seen in a properly Coded Theme. A theme must be written keeping all of the sides of WordPress in mind. Some of the top theme stores are:-

• Genesis Framework – StudioPress
• Thrive Themes
• ElegantThemes

Having A good theme will always give you and your users the best experience with speed and functionality.

More Important Tips

Keep Your WordPress Updated. Developers at WordPress regularly make their software more Faster and securer so make sure you have the latest one. Keep your Plugins Updated.

Keeping plugins updated, especially your cache and booster plugins will make sure have you have the latest coding and enhanced features available today. Also helps in reducing plugin vulnerability.

Minify our CSS, Minify your HTML. You may find Minifying options in your Cache plugin >> General Settings.

After you’ve gone through these performance-enhancing practices, if your site is still really slow, I’d recommend hiring a developer who can look into it and find the source of the problem and/or choosing a new WordPress host.