Thursday, 23 May 2019

The Ultimate Guide to Page Speed Optimization for WordPress


Imagine visiting a website which takes a lot of time to load, will you stay at that site or will you leave it? Of course, if a site takes more than 4-5 seconds to load, you will get irritated and leave the site finally. Having a great page speed loading time in WordPress benefits your business and visitors will stay on your website for longer time and search engines will rank your sites higher in search results as well.



Having a website with slow page loading speed will affect your business as nobody wants to waste their time on a slow site. Internet users do not have a lot of patience when it comes to page loading speed.

Why is having a fast loading site is important?


1. Fast page loading speed helps increase your site's ranking in SERPs
2. Slow page speed will decrease your site's bounce rate.
3. Faster page speed increases conversion rates
4. It leaves the visitors of the site happy and satisfied.

When you talk of page speed, it is simply the measurement of how fast your site's contents load. So when you talk of page optimization, page speed is one of the things you should be working on.

So here are some of the steps that can help you in improving the page loading speed of your WordPress site-

1. Backup your site
It is very important to make a backup before doing any major changes to your site. You can back up your site easily by installing a backup plugin. It is important to create a backup so that you don't lose data and it helps you restore data of the previous version. Restoring the data to the previous version is better than doing it all over again.


2. Optimize your site's images
High-resolution images take more time to load and this affects your page speed. While uploading images in the site, make sure to choose the correct image file type. The file type has to be chosen on the basis of which colors the image has. If the image is rich in colors with no transparency, use JPEG format in it. GIFs fit images with flat colors. Most of the times, site owners make use of JEPGs and PNGs file types for images. If you want to have quality images, make sure to select high-resolution images and reduce it into a smaller size. This will create a better quality for images rather than using a small resolution image.


3. Choose an appropriate theme
WordPress has a lot of themes to choose from. WordPress themes look good and have all the features that you can imagine they might decrease the speed of your site as they don't pay any importance to the site's performance. To create a successful blog or website, choosing the right theme that prioritizes performance is very important. Priority must be given to theme's performance than its features because no matter how many features it has if your site isn't performing well, then it's useless. No matter what theme you choose, always prioritize performance over features.


4. Install WordPress caching plugin
WordPress pages are dynamic. To build your pages, WordPress has to run a process to find the required information, put it all together and then display it to the user. This process takes a lot of time and involves a lot of steps and can slow down your website when many people visit your website at the same time. That's why we recommend you to use a WordPress caching plugin as it makes your site much faster. So you must have installed and used a WordPress caching plan for your website as it makes your WordPress site nearly from 2 to 5 times faster.


5. Use faster plugins
Poor WordPress plugins may affect the performance of your site and slow down the loading speed of your website. It increases your page load time and slows down the site. So it is very important to choose the right plugin that will help in improving the performance and loading speed of the site. To help you choose the right plugins, we think the following are our picks of the most common and best plugins for WordPress-


Wpforms
Solilioquy
Shared counts
Envira gallery

Apart from these, you can test other plugins as well. Simply run the speed tests before and after installing the plugin and compare its impact on the site's performance.


6. Use appropriate social media buttons

Social media has always been a big and important part of digital marketing. Placing the social media buttons on the right and appropriate place makes it easier for the users to share the content of your site with others. Thus, there is no doubt that one of the best ways to share the content and products of your site on other social media platforms is by adding social media buttons on the site. Thus, make sure to add these social media buttons on your site and place them where they can be easily visible to the visitors.


Results and conclusion


As we said at the beginning of this blog that WordPress page speed optimization is very important and is a must for improving the site's performance and for increasing site's page load speed. The points mentioned above were some of the steps and techniques which will help you learn how to improve your WordPress site's speed and performance. Go ahead and try out these techniques. Don't forget to check the site's speed before and after implementing these practices. You will be surprised how these practices work for you and boost your WordPress site's performance and speed.

Also if you know of other practices as well, do share them with us. We would love to know about ore practices that will boost the performance of the WordPress website. Do share them with us in the comment section below.

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