WordPress site owners have to take in consideration many things so that their website functions properly. A website with excellent content, a professional design, it’s not enough if the load time is too long… so WordPress speed optimization is very important.
WordPress speed optimization – Why it matters?
Firstly site visitors won’t be patient enough to wait for the site to load. Even a few seconds of delay in page loading, results in a big abandon rate for that page.
Secondly search engines (like Google) rank websites with fast-loading times higher than the slow-loading ones.
Finally, you’ll also want to be aware of the effects of your site’s speed across platforms. More and more people have been using mobile devices to browse the internet than desktop computers.
How to test the loading time of your website?
Site load time is very important for your website so the first thing to do is to test the loading time of your site. There are a variety of tools to help you with this. To mention a few Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or Pingdom Website Speed Test.
The things to look for, are: load time, number of requests, and page size. Did you know that here at WPFitness we offer a free site audit which includes all this and many more?
WordPress speed optimization – How can I do it?
There are many things to take in consideration when optimizing a WordPress site for speed. I will mention bellow the most basic things to achieve biggest results.
The first thing you can do is to choose a good hosting provider. A dedicated WordPress provider is usually better. Depending on your site size you may consider dedicated hosting instead of shared hosting.
The second thing you can do is to use a lightweight WordPress theme / framework. You can usually optimize a website but from a certain point every detail matters(generalist vs specialized theme, a theme tailored just for your needs, the amount of features..)
The last thing to do is to install a WordPress optimization plugin(WP Rocket, Swift Performance, W3 Total Cache) which will take care out of the box with the vast majority of optimizations that can be done. Of course this is simplistic approach but delivers the biggest results quickest. There are many optimizations that can be done using these plugins, others or none at all like: Reduce image sizes, Minify JS and CSS files, Use a CDN, Enable GZIP compression, Cleanup WordPress database, Deactivate or uninstall plugins, Keep external scripts to a minimum and many more.
Above all keep in mind this. You shouldn’t expect miracles, but a lot can be done with a minimum effort. It all depends on site size, mandatory features, theme and a lot of other factors so maybe you could benefit from a free analysis from us.
