Having a slow website should be a crime…
No seriously, everyone hates sluggish websites. Yes, the websites that make us lose our patience drives us crazy, and ultimately piss us off.
I don’t want you pissing people off and going to jail.
So I’m going to show you 5 different ways to speed up your WordPress website and keep your freedom.
Before I grant you this list. You must understand why page speed is important, how fast a website should load in 2019, and how to test your website speed.
Page speed is an important aspect of UX or User Experience. A great user experience equals more conversions. Living in a world where technology is taking over and attention spans are decreasing explains why having a slow website could increase your website’s bounce rate.
The goal is to have a web page load speed under 2 seconds.The average webpage loads from 2-3 seconds.
Anything more than 4 seconds is SLOW.
How Do I Know If My Website Is Slow?
To test your web page speed I recommend using- Google Page Speed Insights.
Learn how to test your web page speed for free here. Now that you have tested your website here are a few ways to improve your website speed below:
1. Install a WordPress Caching Plug-in
When you click on a link that takes you to a webpage a process is created. WordPress web pages are dynamic. This means that the process it takes to gather the information and create the webpage happens every time you click on something on the website.
The problem with this is that this is time-consuming,
Think about it like this……
Imagine going to a fast food restaurant and the food is ready for you in under a minute.
Whereas you eat out at dine-in restaurants and you have to order and wait for your food longer than you will have to wait at the fast food restaurant.
Dynamic web pages would be fine dining. But to help with speed and prevent the process from happening over and over again install a caching plugin.
What this plugin does is make a copy of the webpage after it is loaded once and present this copy to users thereafter. This speeds up your website tremendously.
Two of the most reliable caching plugins are WP Rocket (Paid) and WP Super Cache (Free).
2. Get Better Hosting
Shared Hosting is common but there are some downsides. Sharing a server with other users could potentially slow your website. The reason being that if your neighboring websites are getting heavy traffic it causes your website to move slower. It could even reach a point to where the server you are in gets so much traffic that it crashes.
What do we recommend?
If you are just starting out there is no need to get a whole server to yourself. The best type of host to use is a Virtual Private Server. This type of server allows you to rent out space on a server. In this space, you are by yourself and don’t have to worry about neighboring websites driving traffic and slowing down your website. We use DreamHost, but Blue Host is great to use as well.
3. Update Your WordPress
WordPress constantly has updates but these updates aren’t always a new feature of the website. Some of the fix bugs and issues of the website that may have caused your website to load slowly. Not updating WordPress also creates security issues and make your website unsafe.
4. Optimize Images
Images are great to have to bring attention to your website. But they may be too large in size or not compressed which slows down your website. Also, it isn’t recommended to upload images directly to your webpage. Upload the image to software that edits photos so you can optimize the images for the web.
The type of file the image plays a role too. JPEGSs require are lesser in size and lesser in detail. This is great to use to avoid high memory on your website. PNGs on the other hand, are better in quality but require more memory. It is recommended to use JPEGs for basic images and PNGs for images that are full of color. Optimally, images should be 1920×1080 pixels AND under 300kb
WP Plugins:
Some WordPress Plugins that can assist you with this are Smush, Ewww, and Optimole.
5. Keep Background Processes Under Control
These processes are run beneath the surface of the website and one of them is the WordPress backup plugin. It’s important that this is running during the times traffic is low on your website. Also, frequently check your crawl reports on Google console for errors because issues that are found can slow down your website.
Overview
Increase your web speed and boost your conversions. I know there is much that goes into increasing web page speed but hey at least you won’t be pissing anyone off.
