Every second counts when it comes to page speed, especially when speed can directly affect the user experience of your customers and your search engine ranking. Slow page loading times are common 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 resize each image you intend to use before uploading it to your database by compressing the file. Compressing images could make them smaller by 30% – 80% without any noticeable difference to your visitors.
Using the right image format can also 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 a piece of software containing functions that can be added to a WordPress site to extend functionality or add new features. There’s 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 disabling the plugins you don’t actually use you can enhance the performance of your site. Some plugins can severely affect page loading times which is why you should always test a plugin before you decide to use it.
3. Spam comment cleansing
If you’re a WordPress website owner it’s likely you’ve 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 look through and approve them; however, this can greatly reduce the size of your WordPress database, weighing it down and making your website sluggish. To avoid slowing down your page loading times it’s vital to keep on top of the comments being accumulated in the backend.
4. Fix broken links
Broken links are bound to collect over time. They are essentially a hyperlink to a webpage that doesn’t exist and will instead display a 404 error page. As this still requires an HTTP request it’s a waste of your page’s load time.
Broken links are not only a drain on bandwidth due to forcing it to run pointless requests, but they’re also one of the surest ways to get a user to leave your site. Hence, you should make it a habit to periodically check your site and fix broken links.
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 then 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 optimise your site to speed up page loading times and provide a seamless user experience for your visitors. As speed can directly affect your sales by increasing conversion rates, it is vital to keep your WordPress site working efficiently.
Take a look at our monthly plans to find out more. It is simple to sign up for single or multiple sites and there are no long- term contracts – and if you’re not 100% happy with our service then we will happily refund your monthly plan payment.
Don’t let slow page loading times lose you customers!