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Why does the speed of your WordPress site matter so much? It’s because it’s a ranking factor for SERP and helps drive traffic to your website. What if a user visits your website and waits for your site to load? Do you think the user will return?
Regardless of your SEO strategies, you will suffer if your website does not load faster. Your website should load in about two to three seconds; a second beyond that will affect your conversion rate. Slow-loading websites that can’t handle a traffic surge alienate visitors, causing revenue loss.
You can keep your website fast with the right tools and techniques. Website speed optimization can be time-consuming, but the results will be great if you implement the right tricks.
Some factors that affect website speed
Hosting issues can cause your site to load slowly. Choosing a reliable hosting provider that offers the best WordPress integration is essential. Added plugins and tools that are not in use may cause your website to load slowly.
Some images may also cause slow loading. If you don’t optimize the images of your WordPress website, it will affect the time it takes to load. Some poorly optimized themes or themes with many features can slow down the site. Multiple redirects on the page or how you embed JavaScript code can also affect the speed of your website.
How to Speed up Your WordPress Site
1. Update your website
If your website is not updated, it will cause several issues, including slow speed. You must ensure you work with your website’s most updated applications and plugins. Update your theme, core, tools, and security functions.
You must use the latest version of PHP programming to ensure complete compatibility with your website. Most people update the website manually, but it’s quite a task.
Choose an auto-update feature, and there are plugins for the function. It will make sure that your website updates on time. Your website will remain secure and safe with updated plugins.
2. Optimize the images
Image optimization helps your website load faster and keeps your website interface clean. Compress the images to suit your requirements. Configure the compression level, and use different plugins to reduce your file size automatically.
You can use Smush, the most popular image optimization plugin. It offers different options to reduce image files and automatic uploading. With the plugin’s premium version, you can optimize more than 50 images simultaneously, saving you time. The speed improvements you’ll see after image compression are more significant than those you’ll see using an image editor for the website.
3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Use a CDN, or content delivery network, to improve your page loading time. CDN ensures that all the static files on your website—JS, CSS, and images—are delivered rapidly to all visitors’ servers as near as possible.
When you look for a CDN network, consider bandwidth, image protection, and automatic image optimization. You can use Cloudflare as it’s the most popular CDN system. It is free to use, but there are some premium plans with added features for the WordPress website. With a reliable CDN system, your site will load faster.
4. Use social media widgets
Most WordPress themes let you integrate with social sharing buttons. These buttons allow visitors to share content from your WordPress site with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, helping to increase the number of views on the site. However, these buttons rely on JavaScript, affecting the website’s speed.
They track users across the web, which may cause slow loading times and consume bandwidth, affecting the website’s downloading speed. You need to use social sharing buttons without JavaScript to minimize these issues. There are WordPress plugins that provide light social media widgets without tracking features and JavaScript.
5. Search Engine Crawlers
Using too many search engine crawlers could be detrimental to your website. Some crawlers use more resources, leading to slow loading times. Some are malicious and intend to slow down your site. You must not allow the harmful ones. Only allow the ones that are good for your site. Genuine search engine crawlers will enable your website to feature in search results without harming your site.
Some popular ones are – Googlebot, Slurp, Duckduckbot, and Bingbot. Semrushbot and Ahrefsbot are optional; you can provide them access to your website. Don’t give access to unfamiliar bots, which may affect the speed.
6. Minify JS and CSS files
Are you aware that CSS and JS files can affect your website’s performance? The size of each page affects the page loading speed. However, you can minify both files to improve your website’s speed.
You can install a popular plugin and auto-optimize. It handles the optimization process and lets you exclude files you don’t want to minify. For example, some people don’t minify Google fonts. You’ll have an option to choose from.
7. Conduct a technical SEO audit
SEO is getting your site ranked on Google’s top pages. Framed SEO policies can improve your site’s security, keywords, and website speed. Conducting a technical SEO audit of your WordPress website will help you fix issues related to the site.
Technical SEO audits include a complete review of your website’s speed and performance across multiple devices. In addition to speed, they help you target site map, performance, crawlability, content, server, and security issues.
Final words
If you are creating a new WordPress website, you need to install WordPress and choose a premium WordPress plugin that offers speed and performance. You should also prioritize website security and update your website every month.
Identify what causes slow speed and work on it. Optimize your database and servers. Use the caching function for enhanced speed. By making small changes, you can optimize the website’s speed.
Do you still need help with your website speed? Check out our WordPress Speed Optimization Service today!
