One of the most common issues surrounding the performance optimisation of WordPress sites relates to speed problems. Improving your WordPress site speed should be a continuous and highly important process to enhance your performance level and results.
In this article, I will discuss how important your site's performance optimisation is, and I will guide you through optimising its speed, focusing on websites built with WordPress (the vast majority).
The Importance of Your Site's Speed
Your website's speed is directly linked to its performance in terms of visits and results. This factor is considered one of the most important in measuring user experience and is used by search engines, like Google, when choosing which search results to display.
According to a Kissmetrics study, 47% of consumers expect the pages they access to load in under 2 seconds. Furthermore, about 40% of users abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
As you can see, every second counts for the user. By the same logic, every second counts for optimising the results generated by our website.
WordPress and Your Site's Speed
According to W3Techs, an entity responsible for conducting various studies, around 37% of websites are currently powered by WordPress technology. In this sense, WordPress stands out as the clear market leader.
If you happen to have a slow WordPress site, there are countless reasons why you should stop everything you are doing and work on improving your WordPress site speed immediately, as you are most likely losing business opportunities, sales, or visits on your site.
The good news is that the process of optimising your site's speed performance does not need to be time-consuming or complicated; quite the opposite.
In this article, I will identify and cover 7 tips to improve your WordPress site speed, in order to provide a better user experience for your visitors and avoid losing contacts and business opportunities.
Even if your site does not have clear speed issues, these tips can be beneficial for you, as improving your site's loading speed by just one second can be the difference between a conversion or the user leaving.
Here are the 7 Tips to Improve Your WordPress Site Speed
Tip 1: Optimise Your Site's Images
1. Optimise the site's images
A very common mistake is placing unoptimised images on the site. Many people take an image from the internet and, regardless of its size, simply put it on the site without taking care to reduce those images as much as possible.
Obviously, having a 2MB image, or even a 10MB one as I have witnessed, will greatly delay the loading time of any web page. This size is often associated with the image's high resolution.
One of the basic optimisation processes involves reducing the image resolution to reasonable sizes (typically, nothing larger than 2048×2048 pixels should be uploaded to the site), but the best solution is to reduce the image to the size it will actually appear on the site.
After reducing the image, it should be optimised with tools like tinypng.com. This tool will reduce any excessive file size the image may still have, even after the resolution has been reduced.
Another interesting solution for optimising images would be to install a plugin like WebP Express. This plugin does not reduce the image resolution – that part must be done manually – but it does perform optimisation and changes the image extension to webp.
Using webp images is very important for Google, and they are starting to require images to be converted to this format because it is much lighter and more optimised for web pages.
Although WordPress does not allow the use of webp images, the “WebP Express” plugin works around this limitation, thus helping with image optimisation on your slow WordPress site.
Tip 2: Use Caching Plugins
2. Use caching plugins
If you have a slow WordPress site and do not have a solution like W3 Total Cache, now is a good time to install and configure it on your site.
There are other solutions and combinations of various plugins and services that can be chosen to provide caching solutions, but this plugin (W3 Total Cache) has everything needed: Page caching, Minification (HTML, CSS and JS) and Browser caching.
Other solutions like Autoptimize and Wp-Rocket are well-known options on the market, and they work well together. The first is free, but only serves for minification and combining html, css and js files. The second is a premium plugin, but it is one of the best page caching solutions available.
Regardless of the solution chosen, a caching plugin will help deliver pages quickly, avoiding long waiting times.
Tip 3: Implement LazyLoad Technology on Your Site
3. Implement LazyLoad on the site
If your WordPress site has many images and videos, a solution like the a3 Lazy Load plugin can greatly help with loading time.
This is a solution that is often already included with other caching plugins, but it is important enough to make sure it is implemented.
Lazy load essentially delays the loading of images and videos on the page, but only those that are not visible to the user. This allows for a much faster loading time than if all images had to load right at the start.
Tip 4: Use a Content Distribution Network (CDN) Service
4. Use a CDN service
A good solution to improve your site's loading time is to use a CDN service such as Cloudflare. This type of service can often already include image optimisation, lazyload and caching, making it a powerful solution for any WordPress site.
However, the free version of Cloudflare is not enough to significantly improve the speed of a slow WordPress site. The best solution would be one of the paid packages, so that we can enjoy all the benefits of the CDN service.
When we use a CDN service, the site's static files (mainly images and videos) are delivered to the visitor by the CDN's server network, which is much faster than delivering them from our own server, which usually has fewer resources and is slower.
Tip 5. Reduce the Number of Plugins Used on Your Site
5. Reduce the number of plugins used on the site
One of the great advantages of WordPress can often become its worst enemy.
The ease with which we add new plugins and new features helps make WordPress one of the best CMS platforms at the moment.
This ease of adding new features by installing new plugins is often abused, and problems start to arise from this kind of misuse.
Using too many plugins can affect a site's page loading time, and in some cases, the plugin's own code may not be optimised. There is also the possibility of conflicts between plugins, which worsens the situation.
To avoid problems like this, I recommend reducing the number of plugins as much as possible, and if possible, adding the same functionality directly to the WordPress theme. It is always necessary to consider whether a particular feature is important enough to warrant adding another plugin.
To find out if the plugins on your slow WordPress site are causing the delay, the solution is to deactivate all plugins, then reactivate them one by one and test the speed between plugins to identify those with conflicts.
Tip 6. Use an Optimised WordPress Theme
6. Use an optimised WordPress theme
Like plugins, WordPress themes can also be a problem. It all depends on the type of theme, what features it adds to the site, and how well the theme's code is optimised; all of this will influence page loading time.
There are WordPress themes that are so poorly optimised that I would never recommend anyone use them. It is during the web development process that it is important to choose the right theme.
The more features a theme has, the heavier it will be, and if these features are not going to be used, that is a sign that it is a good idea to look for a simpler, more optimised WordPress theme.
Tip 7. Change Server and/or Hosting
7. Change server and/or hosting
When all options have been implemented and your WordPress site is still slow, this can only mean one thing: you need a server upgrade or to opt for a faster type of web hosting.
There are several types of web hosting. Typically, new projects start with simple shared hosting, but as the project evolves, it is only a matter of time before a faster type of hosting is needed.
The evolution usually goes from shared hosting to VPS hosting, and if the VPS is not fast enough, there is always the possibility of using a more powerful VPS, as most companies offer several VPS packages.
Bonus: Continuously Test Your WordPress Site Speed
A good practice to keep in mind when making improvements to site loading speed is to continuously run tests to measure their loading speed.
There is no point in making the intended improvements if we cannot measure their true impact.
Therefore, I recommend that you produce monthly reports to get an overview of this factor.
However, when making radical changes, such as those discussed in this article, it is recommended that you carry out an audit before making improvements to the site, and also after they have been implemented. This way, you can gain insight into the effectiveness of these tips in improving your site's speed.
For this purpose, I recommend 4 testing tools: PageSpeed Insights, Think With Google, GTmetrix and Pingdom Tools.
The first two suggested are, in my opinion, the most important, and it is no coincidence that they are tools developed by Google, which adds extra importance to achieving good results.
As for the tools developed by Pingdom, these can be more difficult to understand, so if you need help, this guide can assist you in using them.
Typically, a slow WordPress site that is static, and whose content never or rarely changes, can be optimised and will remain so for a long time. However, for sites with constant updates and content changes, it is a different case.
In such cases, constant monitoring and maintenance are necessary, because during the process of updating plugins, they can introduce new problems that did not exist before, and will contribute to the site's slowness.
The creation of new content on the site also requires constant monitoring to ensure that the collaborators who add it do not undermine the entire optimisation plan that has been implemented.
In conclusion, this entire process of improving site speed, although accessible to anyone willing to learn, still provides an advantage to those who have been in the field for a long time, as there are highly important technical details.
If you need a professional WordPress Site Optimisation service, Be-Wide Online Solutions is at your disposal, with an experienced team in carrying out these services with proven results.
