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.
