Speed and agility are the most obsessed factors in the digital world. One cannot afford to miss a second over the internet as it will leave him / her behind. As an online business person, the speed at which your customers are able to access your website is directly proportional to the site’s revenue and performance. It is known as page loading time.
If your loading time is good, you’ll have high engagement, and more revenue.
Conversely, you’ll observe a rise in bounce rates, a fall in conversions, and a decline in search engine rankings if your website is unresponsive and forces visitors to wait for even so briefly.
Luckily, there are many solutions to such problems. By implementing our handful of strategies, your WordPress website is definitely going to speed up its performance from now onwards. Without further ado, let’s get started.
Before jumping on “how”, let’s explore the “why” part.
Why Is It Essential to Accelerate Your Website Speed?
The rapidly changing digital era has changed quite a few things for us. Today’s users expect everything to be on their fingertips within seconds. Although it’s tough, it’s not impossible.
Your website must load quickly, operate well, and have an excellent conversion rate when it first goes live.
Thus, you must optimize your website for the greatest user experience if you want to achieve any kind of objective, including increasing page visits, leads, and customer conversions. And site speed plays a huge influence in it.
Your WordPress website’s performance may also affect how highly it ranks in search results. Google considers a number of variables, such as user engagement and speed, when ranking your website. Search engines are informed by a user-friendly and quickly loaded website that you value your visitors and are offering them an excellent experience. This will increase the likelihood that your content will appear higher in search engine results.
WordPress optimization is a continuous process. It is not something “done and dusted”. If your website is an old one with more content, then it becomes even more difficult to maintain and optimize its performance .
How to Optimize Your WordPress Site Performance?
After discussing the importance of site optimization, now we’ll take a look at how to do this. Read on following impactful strategies to explore.
Choose a Reputable Hosting Service Provider
All of the files on your website are stored by your web server, who also serves them to users when they enter in your URL. All the site optimisation in the world won’t matter if your host makes a mistake.
Thus, it’s critical to pick a WordPress hosting company that provides dependable customer service, high uptime guarantees, and quick speeds. Additionally, you should search for one that offers capabilities unique to WordPress, such as automated upgrades and backups For this reason, a lot of website owners decide to use WordPress.com for hosting.
2. Select a Premium WordPress Theme
There is a vast array of themes available for WordPress users, each with unique functions and aesthetics. The WordPress Theme Directory offers thousands of alternatives, many of which include functionality and layouts tailored to particular industries and website kinds.
Even if it could be tempting, there are many additional factors to take into account when selecting a design. Long-term damage will result from selecting one that performs poorly but has a nice appearance. WordPress themes are always customizable to better fit your style.
3. Optimize Images
Though they are a crucial component of any website, images may significantly slow down loading speeds due to their high file sizes. This step might potentially be a game-changer if your site isn’t loading as quickly as you would want and you haven’t optimized your photographs.
Remember that larger photos may take longer to load, so make sure your assets are as little as possible before adding any.
In WordPress, there are several methods for optimizing photos. One is to use an image editing software like Photoshop or a compression application like ImageOptim to resize your photographs before uploading them.
The second option is to make use of a WordPress plugin like Smush, which optimizes photos as you submit them. You may also use them to reduce the size of photographs that are already in your Media Library.
4. Employ Caching
Every single file, image, and bit of code on your website has to be loaded by the browser of the person viewing it. By keeping a duplicate of your website in the browser of a visitor, caching helps to speed up this process by allowing the site to load faster when the visitor returns.
You may use a number of caching plugins, such as WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache, to enable this for your website. Different levels of experience are needed for these. Some are simpler to set up but provide fewer customizing choices. Others are more difficult to use, but let you tweak every aspect. Take caution here, since improper cache configurations might destroy your website.
However, if your website is hosted on WordPress.com, a caching plugin is not required. You’ve already got this taken care of! You don’t have to be concerned about your website malfunctioning or complex settings.
5. Reduce Third-Party Scripts
Similar to plugins, third-party scripts cause your website to load more slowly since they add data that has to be processed each time a visitor comes to your site. They can also follow visitors without their knowledge or consent and cause security flaws. The following are some instances of components and technologies that might add third-party scripts to your website
analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics
Chat windows
Vimeo or YouTube videos that are laced with advertisements
feeds on social media
Though many of these are advantageous, safe, and lawful, you should make every effort to avoid utilizing them. At the very least, you ought to mitigate their impact on your website’s operation.
The Bottom Line
By now, you must be convinced that WordPress is a powerful tool to develop robust and custom-themed websites. You need to carefully analyze your site’s performance to work up on its speed. Furthermore, tips such as optimizing images, deactivating unused plugins, use of commercial DNS, and more, can also help you tailor-made your UX design elements.
So what are you waiting for? Take a leap of faith and jump right into improving your site’s performance for good.
