There have been many studies over the past ten years that indicate having faster website loading times help in sales conversion. Some of those studies also state that if a site doesn’t load in under 3 seconds, people move on and at the potential sale is lost forever. With that stat, the 3 second rule came to be know as a standard metric. Additionally, websites that loads slowly might also see a negative impact with SEO and results in general. T
All that said, here are a few tips help you speed up your WordPress site.
CHECK YOUR SITE SPEED
The first step to is to assess your site’s current state. Low and behold, Google created an excellent tool called PageSpeed Insights. PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.
Head over to the PageSpeed Insight page and enter your website’s URL. A few tests will run on your site, see how fast it is, then give your site a grade on performance from 0 to 100. It also usually includes recommendations on how you can improve your site.
Test your site here: [Page Speed Insights](PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.
After you’ve run the test over at Google PSI, you’ll probably want to make some changes to your site. The following are some recommendations.
REMOVE EXTRA PLUGINS
If you have extra code via unused plugins on your site, you’ll want to turn this off and remove them. There is no need whatsoever to keep them there. Removing unused plugins not only can increase your site speed, it’s a smart choice, as leaving them installed can pose a security venerability.
OPTIMIZING IMAGES
The web is a visual medium, which means images. Does yours have images? Are they optimized? Large images are often the reason for a site to load slowly. How you should fix this issue?
IMAGE DIMENSIONS
We suggest that you plan to use the appropriate dimensions before you upload the images in the first place. By using images with the right dimensions, you’re freeing up your server resources to keep your site running smoothly.
COMPRESS YOUR IMAGES
Image compression is also a great way to reduce your image file size. High quality images usually equates to high file size. File compression works by reducing that file size. Our favorite tool is [TinyPNG](tinypng.com). It’s free and works amazingly well.
WEBSITE CACHING
Website caching is yet another way to reduce the load time of the site. The web server will store a copy of the site locally, which allows the visitor to see the content faster, versus having to reload each page/resource every time the request is made. There are multiple ways to enable caching, server side as well as via a WordPress plugin. The key is to enable it as it is a vital part of website speed. The perk here is that once you’ve installed the plugin or enabled the service on your host, you’re done!
If you would like help in any of these issues as we’ve described, feel free to schedule a call.