Are you looking for tips of how to improve your WordPress website’s speed?
By improving your website speed, you’re increasing your user experience and your customer’s ability to view great content on your site. It is an absolute must to ensure that your website loads quickly.
- Every one-second delay reduces potential page views by 10%.
- reduces satisfaction of your customers by 15 or more percent and affects your conversion rate in a bad way.
By having a website that loads slowly, you are directly affecting your ability to generate sales and therefore bringing revenue to your business. It’s not merely a matter of ranking well in Google, it’s a matter of affecting your bottom line when you have an unsatisfactory website from a loading perspective.
Let’s understand how website speed affects the health of your website.
Having a slow loading website does terrible damage to your conversion rates.
- Approximately 50% of internet users expect a website to load in two seconds or less.
- And another 40% will actually abandon the page completely if it takes more than three or four seconds to load.
Therefore if it takes more than three seconds for your website to load, you’re going to end up losing half the traffic and visitors to your website. So we hope we’ve currently made the point as to the importance of how increasing your page loading speeds is an absolute must with respect to the bottom line.
So what is a good page loading time? We believe that three seconds or below is ideal for page loading speeds from Google’s perspective. Unfortunately, the current reality of the matter is that there are many, many websites out there that take far greater time in order to load. We’re talking about seven, eight, nine, 10, and beyond seconds in order to fully load.
How do you speed up your website in 2021? From our perspective, there is many things that you can consider in order to improve loading time.
#1
It’s the underlying hosting provider that you have.
If you have a $15-a-month hosting solution, likely there is right out of the gate a significant issue and it’s going to negatively affect your loading speed, period, no matter what optimizations you do. We suggest to you strongly, get proper web hosting that has the resources necessary in order to ensure for the best user experience and increased loading times.
Think about it. You’ve spent time, energy, resources, thousands of dollars potentially on the design of a site only to go and place it on a inferior hosting solution. Why? It doesn’t make sense. As traffic grows, it will become even more and more important to upgrade your hosting plan to a substantial solution.
There are really only a few options to consider, either VPS hosting or a dedicated server. Shared-hosting environments from our perspective are not sufficient and not recommended. It’s the absolute cheapest option that allows you to share your resources, your disk space, your RAM with who knows how many other websites that are jammed into that same server.
With VPS hosting, you’re still on a shared-server environment, but you have dedicated portion of those resources available to you. In a dedicated server, you’re not sharing with anyone. You’re in isolated environment. You have as much space as necessary. You can upgrade as much as possible whenever it’s time, and you are in control of the configuration and the setup. These are all very, very important parts.
Keep on reading: Why Good Website Hosting Is Important
#2
We want to minimize HTTP requests.
75% or more of the time it takes to load your page essentially is the page waiting for different parts to load, images, the style sheet, scripts, et cetera. An HTTP request is being made for every one of these components. Therefore, the more elements on page, the longer it’s going to take to load.
#3
You could use a content delivery network referred to as a CDN.
Having your files in a CDN network could be a great way of increasing your site speed. Essentially what happens is these content delivery networks host your files in various servers around the world. Your bandwidth is spread across many different servers reducing its burden, and also being able to load faster. Next, use a caching plugin.
If you’re a WordPress user, there are a number of excellent caching plugins available on the market today, whether it’s Hummingbird, WP Rocket, WordPress Super Cache, WP Total Cache, or others. There are premium versions of most of these plugins that we suggest you invest in. They handle many of the above items we’ve discussed and beyond.
#4
Make sure you’re using a great theme.
The underlying theme of your website is an important factor to your page loading speeds. Not all themes are equal. A lot of websites can look really great, but their loading time is terrible. So what good is that? So when choosing a WordPress theme, make sure that it’s well-developed, make sure that the developer you’re working with knows the intricacies of that particular theme very well and ensure that all opportunities have been taken in order to optimize for page speed and for loading performance.
In conclusion
We hope that you have found some really interesting information here and some steps that you can take for actionable improvements in order to improve your site loading speeds. It certainly can be an eye-opener when you figure out, “Wow. I’ve got a great looking site, but it’s really under optimized and not loading the way it should.” If you take these steps, the ones outlined here, at least you’ll have talking points to either implement yourself or discuss with your developer.
Increase your website speed and it’ll increase user experience.
You’ll get more free traffic from Google.
You can increase your conversions.
And at the end of the day, you’ll increase your revenue from ads.
It all starts with improving your website speed.
