How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

There are many tricks and techniques that you can utilize to speed up your WordPress site. This can be extremely beneficial for your business as a faster site will attract more customers and that will lead to larger profits. From using a local hosting company to thinking outside the box with some intricate elements, we have composed a list of handy tips to get you started;

The Major Differences a Faster WordPress Site Can Make

Increasing the speed of your WordPress site will bring with it several significant advantages. Some of the issues relating to a slow WordPress site are listed below to highlight the importance of ensuring your site is fast enough to appeal to your target audience:

• SERP positioning is a key aspect of staying ahead of the competition. To gain higher placement and be more noticeable to customers, speed is crucial. Google, Bing and all the top search engines use your loading speed to rank you against competitors offering the same service. A slow WordPress site can be catastrophic to how customers value you when they perform a search.
• The average patience level of a regular consumer is around 2-3 seconds whilst waiting for a site to load. This does not give you a huge window to get your page up and running. Anything more than this drastically increases the likelihood of the potential purchase being lost to a rival with a faster site. Nobody has time to waste so investing in a quicker WordPress site can eliminate this issue for your business.
• You could lose almost half of your online sales revenue if your page does not load within one second. That may seem a little dramatic but that is the reality of the world we live in. The digital age has given everyone anything they need almost instantly. People are not prepared to wait when they can get something with a few clicks, even if it means paying a little more than they should.

Now that we have established the reasons behind the urgency to speed up your WordPress site, let’s look further into how to accomplish the increased speed you seek. Here are some pivotal aspects that you should consider if you want to maximize your potential speed and optimize the performance of your WordPress site;

• Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
• Keep external scripts to a minimum
• Deactivate or uninstall plugins
• Cleanup WordPress database
• Enable GZIP compression
• Use a CDN
• Use advanced caching mechanisms with a caching plugin
• Minify JS and CSS files
• Reduce image sizes
• Use a lightweight WordPress theme/framework
• Choose a better web hosting provider

Before you act on any of these suggestions it is probably wise to check your current WordPress site speed and measure it against the anticipated maximum speed it can achieve. Each web hosting provider will have a limit and by taking out some or all of the above items, may not be as effective as you desire if you only have a small amount of growth in pace to gain.

How to measure the speed of your website’s loading ability

Do not underestimate the importance of this stage. Identification can give you an accurate portrayal of what customers are currently seeing and provides key opportunities for improvement. The first phase is analyzing the total loading time of your site using the homepage as a base. This simplifies everything because each page will vary in speed due to its composition.

You will need to select an appropriate testing tools for this exercise. The best on the market are considered to be PageSpeed Insights, Tools.Pingdom.com, and WebPageTest.org. All three use your homepage as a benchmark and can provide vital insight into your current speed, leading you to the crucial areas to focus your efforts on.

As we touched on earlier, the breakdown of each page is different and speed can be affected by a number of various factors;

• The size of the individual page attempting to be opened
• The number of requests the specific page generates
• Whether the page in question is a cached page or not
• The type of information the page hosts in terms of being static or dynamic content.

Final Thoughts

You have to consider the impact the improvement in speed of your WordPress site can have on the overall customer experience. The knock-on effect from this is huge in terms of reputation, growth and your bottom line. It is both a shrewd decision and a wise investment to focus on improving your speed of WordPress site to ensure that it works as hard as possible for your business..