A fast loading speed for your webpages are critical when people are visiting your website. Each additional seconds it takes for visitors to wait for your page to load is time that allows them to change their mind and simply go to a competitor’s website instead. An optimal loading speed will increase your domain authority, traffic, and lower bounce rates. Here’s how you can optimize the pagespeed for your WordPress website.
1. Check Your Website Speed
Before you dive head first into optimizing the pagespeed of your WordPress website, you will need to take a look at the factors causing a slow loading speed. Using the PageSpeed Insight Tool, obtain an analysis of your site’s performance on both mobile and desktop. Now that you have an idea of what the cause is, you can optimize the page speed accordingly.
2. Keep Your WordPress Site Updated
Updating your WordPress site is just as important as updating the content on your pages. WordPress is updated frequently with new features, options, layout, bug fixes, and security fixes. With these updates, your themes will sometimes need an update as well. Therefore, keep your WordPress updated to the latest version to avoid an outdated and slow performing site.We can use WordPress plugins to update site performance.
3. Leverage Browser Caching
The browser cache stores files used to display websites that are downloaded by your browser to your computer. If a user has previously visited the website, browser caching allow the browser to retrieve the files from the computer instead of the original server. To leverage browser caching, you can set up an expiry date in your HTTP headers. This way, it can instruct the browser to load these previously downloaded local files rather than making requests to the server.
4. Avoid Landing Page Redirects
Sometimes, having redirects on your website can be hard to avoid. However, the number of redirects you have for your website can increase the loading speed of your page. When a page is redirected, it triggers an additional request for the page to come back. These redirects are like hills on a paved street, they cause delay in the time it additional time for you to arrive at your final destination. Try minimizing the number of redirects required for your web page and remove any that are unnecessary.
5. Enable gzip compression
Gzip compression is a way to compress files to increase file transfer speed over networks. Similar to zipping files to download and send via email, gzip compression allows you to reduce file size to make it easier to transfer over the Internet and improve the loading time.
6. Choose a Good Hosting Provider
Web hosting is an important factor to consider when building your WordPress website. Not only does it help to improve your SEO, it can also improve your page speed and the stability of your site. There are several different web hosting providers to choose from and each of them offers different benefits. When choosing a provider, make sure it has great customer service and support! When your website is down or server is down, you can always reach out to them right away!
7. Reduce Server Response Time
Server response time is the time it takes for your web server to respond to the requests your website sends out. To reduce server response time, you can consider reducing the sources you have on your page by coming certain files, such as CSS and JavaScript. In addition, having the right web hosting can affect the response time. Talk to your web hosting provider or web developer to see if you can compress or combine your files.
8. Optimize Your Images
A high-quality image can take up to couple megabytes of space. When your website is housing over 20 photos or hundreds of photos, if you have an ecommerce site, then your website is loading loads and loads of information. When uploading images onto your WordPress website, consider shrinking and compressing the sizes. There are different tools, such as TinyPNG and CompressJPEG, that allows you to optimize your images without losing the quality. Reduce Comment Pages
9. Avoid Uploading Videos Directly to WordPress
Uploading videos directly to WordPress can cause loading times to slow. Instead, you can embed videos that are hosted on other websites, such as Vimeo and YouTube. This way, there is less information required to be downloaded for your visitors.
10. Reduce Comment Pages
WordPress provides an option for you to separate the number of comments that are loaded on a page.When you have too many comments being loaded, it can cause a delay for your page. Try minimizing the number of comments to 20 or 50, so that each page houses less amount of comments.
The speed of your website can affect many aspects of your page. Organize your pages efficiently to ensure it loads properly for every device. The last time you’d want is for a visitor to leave your page for the delay on your loading time.
About the Guest author:
Rebecca Hill is the Outreach Coordinator at TechWyse, an SEO agency in Toronto, Canada. While she isn’t building relationships with bloggers and influencers in the marketing world, she can be seen rooting for the Blue Jays.