In the modern digital environment, everything is about speed and efficiency. If your website is loading slower than it should, there’s little doubt that your traffic and bottom line are being directly affected. The recognition of this fact leaves many developers and business owners wondering how to speed up WordPress sites. The following information will help you understand why fast loading times are essential, and you’ll even learn a few tips on increasing your WordPress speed.
WordPress Site Speed
WordPress is a powerful content creation tool that has taken the world by storm. In fact, the platform has been used to create over 75 million websites. As with all other website creation tools, however, you’ll need plugins, themes and other tools to make things look perfect and help your branding shine through. Unfortunately, these types of tools can slow things down regardless of your content management system.
Luckily, there are ways to improve your site speed. Through appropriate management of your themes, images, plugins and other content, you can easily speed things along. Just keep in mind that every content management system will need to load all related items, whether is visible on the page or running in the background, before a customer can enjoy your page’s full experience.
At this point, you may be wondering what loading speeds have to do with whether visitors enjoy your page. Unfortunately, they may not be enjoying anything at all it your page is slow to load.
Why Is Site Speed Important?
The best thing you can do for your business is have a fast WordPress site. Without accomplishing this, you’ll undoubtedly be losing money and traffic. This is because online consumers are slightly impatient. In fact, over half of all mobile users admit to abandoning a page based solely on its slow loading time. It’s also worth noting that websites with loading speeds of 1-2 seconds see conversion rates nearly three times higher than those that load in 5-10 seconds.
Even worse, if your websites have slower speeds, that fact may prevent potential consumers from ever even finding you. Google recently announced that page speed will become a ranking factor in mobile searches by July 2018. This means a slow site will negatively affect your SEO ranking. If there were ever a time to learn how to speed up WordPress sites, now is that time.
WordPress Site Speed Optimization Tools
There are a variety of simple steps you can take to accomplish a fast load time in WordPress. If you don’t have the time to do anything manually, however, there are countless tools out there that will immediately improve your website’s loading speed. Here are just a few of those tools.
- YouTube: While you can upload your videos directly to your WordPress site, you’re really not accomplishing much by doing so. This will slow down your page’s load time, and you’ll typically end up paying more for bandwidth. Instead, utilize a video hosting service like YouTube, DailyMotion or Vimeo.
- Content Delivery Networks: Your web hosting servers and your WordPress site might be two entirely different things, but it doesn’t mean they’re not irreversibly interconnected. The further a consumer lives from those servers, the slower your page will load. A content delivery network (CDN), however, has servers all over the world – ensuring every potential customer gets a fast page.
- WP Engine Speed Tool: WP Engine is a digital platform that offers a suite of WordPress solutions focused on performance, integration, agility and other necessities. Fortunately, it also has a speed tool which will increase your site’s loading speed regardless of what’s trying to slow it down.
These tools are great for getting pages to load quickly, but you’ve likely also heard of WordPress speed optimization plugins. There are a few of these that can help as well.
WordPress Site Speed Optimization Plugins
WordPress has a huge plugin ecosystem that can make utilizing the tool much easier. Here are a few focused specifically on speeding things up.
- Perfmatters: This plugin allows you to disable WordPress default options that you’re not using.
- WP Super Cache: This popular cache plugin is simple to use and has been downloaded over 5.5 million times.
- WP Super Minify: This tool allows you to combine and compress files for quicker loading.
- WP Smush.it: This plugin optimizes your images so they don’t slow down your page.
- BJ Lazy Load: This tool stops your entire page from loading at once so speed is increased.
WP Engine includes features that can help speed up your site and make some of these plugins unnecessary. WP Super Cache, for instance, would be unnecessary thanks to WP Engine’s quicker Server Side Caching.
How To Decrease Page Loading Times
If you want to do your part to assist these tools in creating a fast WordPress site, there are a variety of simple tactics you can use on your own. Allowing your site to be cached is one of the simplest ways. Here are a few other tips you can use.
Optimize Images
It’s not always necessary for your images to be high definition. Decreasing your images’ pixel sizes to only the size that’s needed can speed things up. Utilizing JPEG files will also increase loading speeds. Finally, the src attribute allows you to link images from other websites without your page having to load the image on its own. Just make sure you’re using a valid URL when doing so.
Remove Render-Blocking Javascript and CSS
Certain Javascripts and CSS can interfere with your page’s loading time. By removing or deferring these scripts to below the fold, your page will load faster. Reducing the size of your code through using an external style sheet will also help.
Reduce Redirects
Redirects have some uses, but unnecessary redirects, such as 301 redirects and redirect chains, can really slow things down. It’s best to reduce the amount of additional information requests that your server undertakes.
Reduce The Number Of Plugins On Your Site
Every plugin you use, regardless of its purpose, can slow down your page. Remove all plugins that are unused or unnecessary thanks to other tools. You might also avoid a few security issues by getting rid of these.
Get Support For Improving WordPress Site Speed From WP Engine
If you’re wondering how to speed up WordPress in the most efficient way possible, WP Engine is the way to go. Its reliability and infrastructure provides a faster site speed for your customers. Find out how WP Engine can help you speed up your website today.