Step By Step Guide For “WordPress Website Speed Optimization”
After reading this article, you’ll be able to increase your website speed by up to 2 times its current speed, and your pages will load faster, ensuring that visitors don’t leave your site.
It’s important to have a fast website because visitors leave the website if it’s not load in less than 5 seconds. One way to increase website speed is to reduce the size of your images because smaller images mean a smaller page size, which makes your website faster.
Why Website Speed Optimization?
Google has used website speed optimization as a ranking factor for desktop searches since 2010. And as of 2018, page speed became a ranking factor for mobile searches too. Faster page load times lead to better user experience and ultimately, more revenue. In fact, a study by Google shows that as page load time goes up, the bounce rate rises with it.
Common Reasons for Slow Website Load Times
There are numerous reasons why your website might load slowly. The most common reasons are slow connectivity, caching, page size, and render-blocking JavaScript. However, even if you’re not a technical person, the three steps we are going to show you should help you improve your site’s performance.
Reduce Image Size For WordPress Website Speed Optimization
The page size of a website page is crucial, and to reduce page size and optimize images, you can use a plugin. We recommend using the “WP-Optimize“. The plugin will automatically reduce the image size every time you add an image to your WordPress media library, so your website pages will have smaller sizes, leading to faster loading times.
To further optimize your page load times, it’s necessary to enable page cache. By doing so, a copy of your website will be saved in the WordPress database, and when a visitor clicks on your site, they will be served with the saved data, leading to a faster loading experience for them as well.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) can help improve site speed, especially for a global audience. A CDN is a network of servers located all over the world that delivers content to visitors as fast as possible.
How to use CDN?
Step 1: Create an account in Cloudflare Go to Cloudflare.com Click ‘Sign up’, enter details & create an account.
Step 2: Connect your website to Cloudflare click ‘ Add site’, enter your URL & click ‘Add site’ Now choose the plan & click ‘Continue’ twice. You will find details that you need to add to your hosting account Once added, go to Cloudflare click ‘Done & get started’ Complete the steps to connect your site with Cloudflare.
Step 3: Install the Cloudflare plugin After installing the Cloudflare plugin, click ‘Settings’ under Cloudflare & sign in to your account.
Install WP Rocket Plugin
Use the “WP Rocket” plugin, which is an all-in-one website speed optimization plugin for WordPress. It handles common page speed optimizations like caching, preloading, compression, and lazy loading images.
In the media category, you have to choose lazyload all media files. Lazyloading improves page speed by deferring the loading of images and videos until they’re visible on the screen.
Next, we have preloading. Preloading allows you to define essential resources so that browsers know the priority of files that should be loaded first.
HTML/CSS Files Optimization
Minify HTML and optimize Google Fonts.
Minify and combine CSS files
Remove unnecessary scripts like jQuery Migrate
After implementing these optimizations for WordPress site speed, you can compare the results with the original benchmarks using tools like PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and GTmetrix.
If you’re still unsatisfied with your site speed after making these optimizations, you may need more custom work or consider removing plugins and scripts, switching themes, or hiring a developer to make the appropriate fixes.
Give these tips a try and let us know in the comments if they helped boost your WordPress site’s speed.
