Around 34% of all websites use WordPress as their content management software – which translates into 24,808,989 live websites – on the Internet today.
This alone is a testament to the overwhelming popularity of WordPress as a platform that allows you to access the digital presence that is vital to succeed in the 21st century.
But a website is pointless, despite offering exceptional user interface if it takes forever to load!
You will be shocked to learn that 53% of visitors leave a website if it takes over three seconds to load, and 47% of users expect a load time of no more than two seconds.
Imagine the amount of traffic you may lose due to a slow website. And the amount of AdSense money?
This is why you need to bring down your bounce rate by optimizing all webpages for speed — the lower the better. A page that loads in two seconds or less has an average bounce rate of 9.6%, while a page that loads in seven seconds has an average bounce rate of 32%.
Above all, search engines such as Google and Bing now prioritize user experience when ranking a website. And penalize slow-loading websites by lowering their SERP rankings.
The staggering statistics can easily cause you to worry about your website, which is why you should concentrate on how to speed up your WordPress website.
The good news is: you can have a website that is fast and effective with some easy tweaks.
Check Your Website Speed
Before learning how to increase website speed for WordPress, you need to find out your site’s current speed.
Tools such as GTmetrix, Solarwinds Pingdom, and Google Page Speed Insights provide you with comprehensive speed analytics. They will give you:
- The current speed of your website
- Issues that are making your website slow
- Suggestions on how to speed up your WordPress website
Reasons For A Slow-Loading Website
You will get an idea on how to increase website speed for WordPress after running the tools. And if you make the suggested changes, the results will be quick.
A website could have a slow page-load time because:
- The domain is parked on a bad hosting platform, or the server is not configured correctly
- If WordPress isn’t installed properly, the server slows down the website
- Too many active plugins
- Bad plugins or themes from a dubious developer
- The website uses external scripts such as fonts or popup ads
How To Increase Website Speed
Here are a few things to speed up your WordPress website and make the visitor experience better.
Choose The Right Hosting Platform
Choosing the right host is important — as nobody wants their website to crash every time there is a traffic surge!
Choose a host that offers unlimited storage space with good bandwidth. Some popular choices among developers are DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, and SiteGround etc.
Choose A Lightweight WordPress Theme
Who wouldn’t want a website that is easy to navigate and pleasing to the eyes?
However, a theme with features like built-in sliders and headers exhaust the available resources quickly and make a webpage slow. So choose a theme that does not require a lot of space and looks good too.
Reduce Image Size
There is a conundrum among developers when it comes to images — the quality of an image should remain intact on different-sized screens.
Often large images are the reason for a slow-loading website. To speed up your WordPress website, you need to optimize images on your webpage.
You have two choices now: The hard way or the easy way
The hard way: Use recommendations from the speed test and optimize the suggested images.
The easy way: Download an image optimization plugin, i.e., EWWW Image Optimizer or WP Smush and reduce the size.
Minify HTML, JS, And CSS Files
Have you ever noticed that the more storage you use on your phone, the slower it gets? Similarly, when there are unnecessary files on your website, it becomes slow.
An easy fix is to combine files into big chunks — a practice known as concatenation. You also need to minify JS, CSS, and HTML files. Once minified, all formats are removed and the file size is considerably reduced.
The good thing is you don’t need to minify files manually; there are plenty of plugins for WordPress that can do it in minutes.
Activate A Cache Plugin
To speed up your WordPress website, you need to define caching rules — on when the cache should be served.
Thankfully, there are plugins available such as W3 Total Cache, that can define rules and deal with cached elements in the background.
And to top it all, if you add an advanced caching system like Varnish alongside your usual plugin, you will instantly see a better speed.
Some Other Suggestions
What makes WordPress great is that there are many plugins available to speed up a website. And you have a lot of remedies available on how to increase website speed for WordPress.
Apart from the above suggestions, you can also do these for a fast website:
- Use a content delivery network, so all visitors experience a fast page-load time
- Enable GZIP compression with a plugin such as Pagespeed Ninja — on visiting your website the browser will first unzip the data and then display it
- Optimize your WordPress database — get rid of all unwanted files
- Disable all inactive plugins
- Remove plugins that take a considerable amount of space
- Enable lazyload images — images load as you scroll down and not before
- Use excerpts on homepage and archives
- Embed audio or video files — do not upload them on WordPress
In The End
Do you fear that despite all the information on how to increase website speed for WordPress, you may end up crashing your website?
Or you already have a lot on your plate, and even minor tweaks yourself seem next to impossible?
Don’t worry! Noah Digital has your covered. We are Canada’s leading digital marketing agency with over 18 years of experience. Our expert team of WordPress Web Development will give you piece of mind.
If you need guidance on how to increase website speed for WordPress or you want us to speed up your WordPress website — Reach out to us today!
