If the user is on a mobile device, how fast your mobile site loads will determine whether they stay or leave. Having a faster wordpress site can also improve your bounce rate and lower the number of shopping carts abandoned by customers. Google does give some credit for sites that load quickly – helping them rank higher!
What Does This Mean?
If your site is slow, you will lose out on making more money with your business.
This blog will share the WordPress speed optimization tips to boost WordPress performance and increase website speed. We’ve covered why speed is so important for WordPress and how you can improve speed in WordPress immediately.
Page load speed is one of the most important user experience factors for the competitiveness of an agency. A critical aspect of overall performance, user satisfaction, and ultimately search engine rankings, a fast site earns higher than average ratings in all three areas mentioned above.
The research is very detailed on this. Websites that take more than two seconds to load fully lose up to 47% of their visitors. This is particularly true for e-commerce websites, and 25% of online traffic is bounced from the site because they were waiting too long for the content to load. Take note that this includes mobile users who are particularly impatient.
WordPress is the number one platform for websites. It has all the features and technologies you need to optimize resources and get smooth, fast performance. But not all WordPress themes are created equal – it’s important to make sure the decisions you make early on will maximize page load time and lead to an ideal site with well-organized information that is clear and easy to read.
11 Ways To Optimize Page Load Speed on WordPress
Purchase a Better Web Hosting Plan
WordPress hosting is extremely important. If your site takes a while to load, it won’t be worth loading. Low-cost web hosting can lead to low-quality hosting, which will likely lead to slow page speeds. For example, shared hosting takes up resources and space that might otherwise go towards your website and directly impacts how fast a page will load. Dedicated plans are what most people prefer over specific solutions because they offer desirable features like customized server configuration, so you’ll be able to earn the best results for your WordPress website and ensure that visitors will have maximum uptime.
Deploy a Lightweight WordPress Theme
Many WordPress website users want to make an impact. Many free themes offer options like fancy designs or large scale design elements that seem impressive at first glance. But before you load your website with everything from interactive menus to social media links, consider whether using a complex web page theme is the best option. Once you install and set up your new theme, it demands significant resources to be accessible for visitors who connect to your site every day – and demands on resources are almost always more than hosting providers can supply, given the many other users they host as well. If they can’t meet peak demand, your site visitors will struggle to access your content, and your brand may fail!
Reduce Image Size Throughout The Website
Large files are the biggest cause of slow website performance. Uploading images and videos directly to your WordPress site is a bad idea; even embedded media can cause problems if the file sizes are too large. It’s easy to change image sizes without impacting image quality in multiple ways. For example, switching from large-format files like BMP to more efficient formats can make a significant difference. But human users wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, so hosting servers won’t care – but they’ll load much faster for all visitors that come through your site! Lightweight plugins can automatically optimize image file sizes to improve your page load speed.
Minify CSS and JavaScript Files
There’s a way to make your JavaScript files run faster. Rather than removing code that isn’t needed, this approach removes code, so the code doesn’t need as much processing time for your site to load quickly. In addition, you don’t have to worry about learning how it works or editing any files because lightweight plugins like Autoptimize can do all of the hard work for you automatically!
Integrate a Solution for Advanced Caching
Caching is a powerful, simple way to boost your site’s speed, instead of having to load up every element on a page, caching solutions store some elements on the user’s system, meaning that frequently loaded elements will load near-instantly instead.
Implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDNs are a great way to get your web pages loading much faster for users regardless of their location. CDNs create and maintain copies of your website across multiple locations so that users can enjoy much better page load speeds from other servers around the world. CDNs also make it easier for your site’s server to handle the network traffic that has multiple visitors come to your site at once. And when visitors come, they want things to be fast! So when you know which parts of your website are getting more traffic than others, consider using CDNs that put servers closer to these high-traffic areas.
Toggle GZIP Compression
Compressing files helps make them take up less space. eZIP is like ZIP, but it’s optimized for web-based files. It is open-source software that claims to reduce data size on average by 50% more than the ratio achieved with the standard ZIP algorithm. This could potentially be a method to optimize page loading speed without spending more money on a higher-tiered hosting subscription.
Remove Old Content From Your WordPress Database
Your WordPress database has a lot of information in it. Much of it is extremely valuable to you, but that doesn’t mean some things shouldn’t be removed every once. For example, to ensure the site runs more efficiently, consider deleting fake users and spam comments from your database. And when it comes to your reputation and managing negativity, always make sure that you get rid of spam and fake users as soon as possible to avoid problems down the road.
Uninstall Plugins You Don’t Use
High-performance plugins can drain valuable resources from an operating system. This applies when you aren’t using them but also when you are. You can avoid this potentially problematic scenario by replacing certain plugins with services.
Remove Unnecessary External Scripts
Many external scripts are loaded on your WordPress website. These scripts require hosting resources to complete their job. Google Analytics probably takes up a large amount of these resources. However, there could be other scripts that you can do without. You may even be able to load scripts later when needed and still maintain speed for your users if your script is quite big.
Disable Trackbacks and Pingbacks
Trackbacks and Pingbacks have been around for years and have become essential for any website. They alert you when someone makes a reference to your website by linking to it externally. Although this may seem like great news, there are so many other ways to monitor the traffic on your site that you’ll likely find it’s better not to overload your website with this extra functionality.
Search Consoles can effectively do so many things for marketers. It’s well known for being a great way to learn about incoming links, but did you know that it also provides other great advantages, such as making sure your content is indexable in Google’s search engine?
Speed Up WordPress Today
When implementing new strategies and developing software, it’s important to keep in mind that reducing the delay time between when a user navigates to a page to view it in their browser, resulting in an improvement of their experience. If you’re a web agency owner or entrepreneur who runs WordPress sites, you’ll want to follow this page load speed optimization guide from Ultimate Web Toolkit, as it will teach you how to improve your page load speed using useful tips like this one!
You can even go deeper into best practice optimization by delegating tasks to a white label WordPress developer like us. We’ll optimize your WordPress websites for speed and reliability in just a few days.
We hope this blog will help you. In addition, you can check SecureITPress for more blogs on WordPress maintenance services or WordPress website maintenance and related topics.