[vc_row][vc_column icons_position=”left”][vc_column_text]We could quote stats like 40% of people abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, but we don’t need to. Even you know that having a slow loading WordPress site is bad for your bottom line. Or you could let Neil Patel enlighten you more on that right here. What can you do then to ensure your WordPress site’s speed, is the more sensitive topic to spend time talking about. So that’s just what we’ll do.
First of all, begin by testing your site speed. When you access your website yourself, your browser is storing it in the cache and hence, loads it up instantly. That’s why your personal experience with your website is hardly a real-world indicator of its speed. To get a more objective view, use a website speed testing tool. Choose from Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, Pingdom and many other free online speed testing tools, to see how fast your website loads when your users access it.
If you score a loading speed of 1.7 seconds, you are faster than 75% of the web. While that would be a fantastic scenario, you should be aiming at anywhere between 2-3 seconds to keep your users happy. However, certain factors like subpar hosting, large page size, bad plugins, and external scripts can slow your site down.
That would spike your bounce rates, dip your conversions, damage customer experience and significantly affect your business. Moreover, it would also push your ranking down as Google has declared a preference for faster websites.
To say that those repercussions are bad would be an understatement. So let’s take a look at all the ways to make your WordPress site perform at top speed.
Invest In High-Quality Hosting
How quickly your users can access your website and find the content they need depends greatly on how quickly your hosting company can search through multiple databases and retrieve the right webpages.
A single page on a WordPress site can take as many as 150 database queries. The efficiency, and simply, the size of your hosting server, makes a world of difference to how quickly your WordPress site performs.
Clearly, investing in high-quality hosting will reap you big benefits. Most people begin with shared WordPress hosting that costs low and is a great way to kickstart. But once you get serious about your WordPress site and your business, it’s time to move on to quality hosting services designed specifically for WordPress. Owing to its flexibility and scalability, cloud hosting is also gaining a lot of popularity. These are hosted on a cloud computing infrastructure, allowing users to host their own applications, services, and data.
One of the most recommended hosting solutions for high-speed performance is to go with the best managed WordPress hosting services. Some of the most popular ones include WPEngine, SiteGround, and Bluehost among others. Not only do these premium quality services ensure superfast performance but also prevent down times during heavy traffic, optimize your site for feature updates and provide bankable support.
Use a Good Caching Plugin
We spoke about how caching is the reason why your site always loads up quickly on your devices. Why not make sure it does the same for all your users? A good quality WordPress caching plugin does just that.
WordPress pages are dynamic in nature. So every time someone visits your site, WordPress has to run the entire cycle of retrieving the databases and build a page to display. This takes a long time and hence the latency.
A caching plugin is an easy, stress-free and no code way of skipping this tedious process and speeding up your site. These plugins save a copy of the last loaded page on your user’s computer so that it loads instantly when a new query is made. WP Rocket, WP Super Cache (free!) and W3 Total Cache are a few top-notch options. And all you have to do is install the plugin and sit back while it does all the work. If you followed step 1 and opted for a good hosting company, they’ll probably do it for you anyway.
Yes, themes are about more than just looks. Choose your WordPress themes wisely to ensure optimal speed and performance of your WordPress sites. Lightweight themes that focus on getting the job done with an elegant interface are your best friends. Refrain from heavy themes that pack in a bunch of bells and whistles that have little use and slow the site down.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
How far away from your host server is your user located? Users accessing your site from distant locations will have to wait longer while the static files like JavaScript, CSS, and images are fetched from the server. Use a CDN to mitigate this distance. A CDN is essentially a network of servers all around the work. Thus, it will fetch these static files from the server located closest to the user, greatly speeding up your website performance.
Optimize Your Content: Images, Posts, and Comments
As pivotal as good images are to your site, they do consume massive bandwidth and load super slow if not optimized. So use image optimization best practices like slicing, compression, choosing the right format (JPEG over PNG) and others to ensure your images load fast.
Split long posts into pages so the first one can load up immediately and be ready for the visitors while the others load in the background.
Split the comment section into pages too. We all wish for our posts to receive hundreds of comments but if they all load at once, that sure adds up to the drag.
Wrapping Up
Small steps and regular best practices ensure that your WordPress website stays lightweight and delivers a swift performance without compromising on quality. The above steps will help you keep your site loading quickly so that your visitors get what they came for without the annoying spinning wheels. So say goodbye to the bounce and enjoy the traffic. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
