Every second counts regarding page speed, significantly when speed can directly affect the user experience of your customers and your search engine ranking. Slow page loading times are standard for WordPress websites, and it can take time to figure out where the problems lie.
However, faster pages both rank and convert better, so you need to do all you can to boost the speed of your WordPress site.
As a simple starting point, here are five areas to investigate and improve upon.
1. Optimise all images
Images can increase the size of your website, leading to slower loading times. You should always compress each image you intend to use before uploading it to your database. Compressing images could make them smaller by 30%—80% without any noticeable difference to your visitors.
The correct image format can significantly reduce the file size and increase your site’s speed. File formats for images used for the web are JPEG, PNG, GIF, and SVG, so ensure all your image files are uploaded in this format so that they don’t make your website sluggish.
2. Disable unnecessary plugins
WordPress plugins are pieces of software containing functions that can be added to a WordPress site to extend functionality or add new features. There are so many plugins out there to explore, and often, website owners will enable several plugins to test out various options on their site, with some of them ending up unused and unnecessary.
By turning off the plugins you don’t use, you can enhance your site’s performance. Some plugins can severely affect page loading times, so you should always test a plugin before you decide to use it.
3. Spam comment cleansing
If you’re a WordPress website owner, you’ve likely received annoying spam comments at least once. Most of the spam comments come from automated spam bots, and if you don’t moderate them, you’ll find it can reduce your SEO score and significantly slow down your site.
You may be tempted to leave a backlog of unapproved comments due to the time and effort it takes to review and approve them; however, this can significantly reduce the size of your WordPress database, weighing it down and making your website sluggish. To avoid slowing down your page loading times, keep on top of the comments that accumulate on the backend.
4. Fix broken links
Broken links are bound to collect over time. They are essentially hyperlinks to a webpage that doesn’t exist and will instead display a 404 error page. This still requires an HTTP request, so it wastes your page’s load time.
Broken links drain bandwidth by forcing it to run pointless requests, and they’re also one of the surest ways to get a user to leave your site. Hence, it would help if you habitually check your site and fix broken links periodically.
5. Use browser caching
Every website has static components that can be cached (saved) in a user’s browser for when they return in the future. When the visitor returns, the content can be called up from within the cache rather than reloading the entire page, resulting in faster overall load times for your visitor.
The expiry time will vary based on the different resources you’re caching, but most should be set to a minimum of a week and up to one year in the future.
WP Tech Support can optimize your site to speed up page loading times and provide a seamless user experience for your visitors. Speed can directly affect your sales by increasing conversion rates, so it is vital to keep your WordPress site working efficiently.
Please take a look at our monthly plans to find out more. Signing up for a single or multiple site is simple, and there are no long-term contracts. If you’re not 100% happy with our service, we will happily refund your monthly plan payment.
Don’t let slow page loading times lose you customers!