Intro
Why do you need to speed up your WordPress website? Simple, it will cost you way too much.
On average, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load. People will leave your site, and they will never know what your website offers. We don’t want that.
A slow site has a significant impact on website ranking. If the search engines see that people are leaving before they make it to your site. They will send the traffic somewhere else.
Here’s the proof. Check it out here
Know we covered the why. Time to cover the how
You are going to learn
- Common issues that cause your site to slow down
- Best tools to increase your website speed
- How to achieve super-fast load time
How do you test your website loading time?
I like to use a website called GT Metrix for this. It runs a test and gives you on grade on different metrics and how to improve them.
What Causes a WordPress website to load slowly?
There can be several things that cause your website to slow down.
We will cover the most common problems that cause WordPress to slow down.
WordPress Hosting Provider
Many times we ask our clients what hosting provider they use. They usually name a company that doesn’t value speed in their hosting plans.
They are many low-cost options that pack more punch for your dollar.
Some good hosting providers if you’re using WordPress
If you are on a budget, We suggest going with Siteground. They are usually the fastest for the price.
The image size is too big
Often we get a beautiful crisp image from a stock photo website. These images are massive in size.
It doesn’t mean we can’t use them. It just means we need to optimize it for the website.
Tools like Short Pixel allow us to compress and resize the image to a suitable size for the web.
Not using a CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) allows us to speed worldwide consistently. Usually, a company that offers this service has servers worldwide with your website preloaded on them.
Most hosting providers are based out of the U.S. People across the pond will have a hard time loading up your site. Using a CDN fixes this problem.
Companies like Cloudflare offers a pretty excellent free option.
Not using browser caching
What is this? Browser caching loads the static elements of your website to the visitor’s browser, such as a logo, images, etc.
Caching will reduce your site load time because the visitor browser doesn’t need to download things that don’t change.
Plugins like WP Rocket does an awesome doing this.
If you’re using Siteground hosting, they have a free one that works pretty well.
If you’re on a budget, check out W3 Total Cache
The website hasn’t been maintained
We’ve all been there. We didn’t log in to the site’s backend for a while.
Chances are, the plugins, themes, and core updates are behind.
Let’s get them to update not only it slows down your website. It poses a security risk to your site.
Too many HTTP Request
A fancy way to say to reduce how many times the web server talks to the visitor’s browser.
Using a lightweight WordPress theme like Astra Theme have fewer request than most themes.
Combing your website files like theme files will reduce the number of requests your website makes.
Plugins like automize make this super easy
Conclusion
Take these tips and make your website blazing fast. You will see great results from this.
Have any questions? Let me know in the comments.
