How to boost your site performance on WordPress?

How to boost your website’s performance on WordPress?

Do you want to speed up the WordPress site? Fast loading pages help you provide good user experience, increase your page views, and help you with your WordPress SEO. In this blog post, we will share some techniques to improve your WordPress site’s performance.  We will try to briefly explain why site performance is essential, […]

Do you want to speed up the WordPress site? Fast loading pages help you provide good user experience, increase your page views, and help you with your WordPress SEO. In this blog post, we will share some techniques to improve your WordPress site’s performance. 

We will try to briefly explain why site performance is essential, what factors slow down your website, and some actionable steps you can take to speed up your website immediately.

It is really needed because with online businesses, say for gaming and gambling, the users requires a speedy website to feel content with the quality of services they are getting. 

Why is Speed important for your WordPress Site?

Studies have shown that from 2000 to 2016, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds.

But what it has to do with you as a website owner?

This means that you have significantly less time to show your content and convince them to stay on your website before losing interest in your site.

A slow website means that users are going to leave your website before it even loads. 

A StrangeLoop case study came up with some pretty interesting facts. According to the study, a 1 second delay in page load time can lower your conversion by 7% with 11% fewer page views and 16% downfall in customer satisfaction.

And that’s not enough; search engines like Google have already started penalizing slower you’re pushing them down in the search results, which means less traffic for slower websites.

How to Check your Website’s Speed?

Often beginners think that their website is fast because it doesn’t feel slow on their computer. This is a HUGE mistake. 

Since you frequently visit your website, Chrome and other modern web browsers store your website in the cache and automatically prefetch the site’s data as soon as you start typing, thus creating an illusion of fast page load speed.

However, this never works the same way for a visitor visiting your website for the first time. Users from different geographical locations will have a different experience from yours. 

We recommend testing your website using tools like IsItWP’s WordPress speed test.  The test is pretty accurate and gives you the time taken by your website to load completely when a new visitor tries to visit your site.

After you run the speed test, you might wonder what a good website speed you should aim for is. If you ask us, a good page load is below two seconds. 

However, the faster you make it, the better it is. An improvement for a few milliseconds from here and there can add to shaving a hair or even a full second from your time to load.

What Slows Down Your WordPress Website?

Your speed test report is likely to give you multiple recommendations to improve your WordPress performance. However, most of the recommendations are technical jargons, which is hard for beginners even to understand.

To learn what is slowing down your website is pivotal to improve your site’s performance and make a smart long-term decision. 

The primary causes of slow WordPress websites are:

  • WordPress Configuration: If your WordPress site is not serving cached pages, it will overload the hosting servers, causing your website to crash entirely or slow.
  • Page Size: Mainly images that aren’t optimized for the web or the users reaching you from mobile phones.
  • Bad Plugins: Poorly coded plugin slows your website significantly and lowers your website’s performance.
  • External Scripts: External scripts such as ads, front loaders, etc. can also cause your website to load slower.
  • Web hosting: When your web hosting server is not configured correctly, it can hurt your Speed website.

Speeding up your WP Site

The mere thought of making changes to your website configuration can be horrible for beginners, especially if you are not a tech-geek.

But stop worrying, you are not alone in this. This is something every newbie goes through. Plus, we have helped thousands of WordPress users to improve their site performance.

Here we will help you, too, by showing you how you can improve your site performance with just a few clicks. And hey, you will not have to make changes to the code.

If you can point-and-click, you can do this.

Optimize Images for Speed

Images can help you bring life to your content and boost engagement. Studies have found that using colored visuals makes people 80% more likely to read your content.

However, if you are not using optimized images, they can get hurt more than helping. Images that are not optimized are one of the main reasons for the website’s Speed threats.

We suggest you to use photo editing software to optimize your image for the web before uploading. In their original sizes, photos can be enormous. You can compress and change the format of the image to decrease your image size by 5x.

Keep Your WordPress Site Updated.

WordPress is a well-maintained open source project used for making websites that are updated frequently. Each update not only offers new features, but it will also fix some security issues and bugs. Your WP plugins and themes may have regular updates too. 

As an owner of the website, it’s your responsibility to regularly update your WP site and ensure that themes and plugins are updated to the latest version. Not doing so will cost you a slow website that is also unreliable and vulnerable to security threats.

Install a WP Caching Plugin 

WordPress has to run a process to find the required information, combine it all, and then display it to your users to build up your pages.

This process can take up many steps and slow down your website when you have multiple people visiting it at once. 

Therefore, we suggest every WP site use a caching plugin. Caching can make your WP site anywhere from 2x to 5x faster.

End Words

From online grocery stores to online gambling websites, websites of every nature work hard to optimize their site performance. If you pay attention to it, we are sure your site will be among the fastest loading websites.

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Jessica Davis
Marketing Evangelist
At ThemeMattic, we believe WordPress and websites over it are not only about development and management. There is a lot more to it and Jessica has made sure over the past years that we don’t miss out on what else is important...