None of us want to wait around due to the slow loading speed of a website. This is why, approx 40% people lose their patience and plan to step up the site which takes a few seconds to load. It has become one of the major reasons behind customer dissatisfaction and is crippling especially the e-commerce sites with almost 80% discontented shoppers.

No one would like to come again on the same site, if its web pages are slow while loading. Even, the most reliable and renowned search engine named Google turns off the traffic for those sites and they fall in search engine ranking.

Why Focusing On The Website Speed Is Imperative!

Whenever anyone visits your website at the first time, then what is the main thing that captures his attention and convinces him to browse the pages deeply? It is the speed of a website. Hence, no one can avoid the site speed as it plays a vital role to make the visitors stay for a long time.

As per the recent research of Microsoft Bing team, if your site delays for 2 seconds, then the user satisfaction reduces by 3.8%. Besides this, the 2 seconds delay decreases the number of clicks by 4.3% which directly means the loss of 4.3% revenues per user. So, if WordPress site consumes long time in loading, then the possibility to lose maximum visitors gets increased automatically. Hence, take a crucial step before you lose all your potential customers/visitors.

Google has already added site speed feature in the ranking algorithm which directly effects search engine optimization. It means that if your website is slow, then the ranking of your site on the search engines will reduce and an array of visitors will start leaving your site due to impatience.

How to Speed up WordPress Website: Complete Process!

From SEO prospects, WordPress speed matters a lot in terms of the better visibility. Almost all of us have heard about it and how it can impact directly to the business. A fast to load site provides better user engagement, improved sales, maximum page views and augmented number of reliable customers.

According to Strangeloop case study, 7% sales can be affected by just 1 second delay. Furthermore, it may cost fewer page views and may decrease probably 16% customer satisfaction.

 

Now, the point is what you need to do to overcome this situation and make the websites faster? Let’s delve into the comprehensive ways that can ingeniously boost the speed, make the visitors satisfied, and keep the web page loading time low.

1. Hosting

If you start an e-commerce site, then shared hosting seems like the bargain and comes at a cost like slow to load and constant downtime in the time of high traffic. So, if you are planning to publish some stuffs with slow loading sites, then it means that you are endeavoring to chop your foot by axe by running your own site on the shared hosting.

Your website’s stress can get down automatically by integrating a powerful feature, which is enough for covering few gray hair in the early stage. So, it would be the suggestion to go for investing in the proper hosting.

2. Embrace Solid Theme/Framework

There will be a surprise for you to know that 20 to 50 frameworks (or default WP themes) are fast in speed and quite lightweight. Hence, the guts remain simple and we compare them to the bloated frameworks comprised with an array of cutting edge features that should never ever used as it slows the site’s crawling down.

3. Choose An Ideal Caching Plugin

WordPress holds a number of quite useful plugins to make the developers’ task simpler and help them built the high-performing websites. But, a few of them are the best and counted in the ideal catching category, because they instantly elevate the page load time. The best and interesting thing is that all these plugins are easy to understand & use. Even they are available free of cost on wordpress.org.

4. Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Definitely, the CDN powers up the website by taking all the essential static files including images, JavaScript, CSS, and more. Moreover, the content delivery network allows the visitors to download them in the best possible manner. It closely serves the files on the server. So, find the reasonable and simple to use CDN which can execute your requisites in a few minutes.

5. Combining CSS & JavaScript Files

Every plugin that you add comes with its own CSS & JavaScript file and each included file has a new HTTP request. Thus, you need to combine them all into a single file to cut down the number of HTML requests and speed up the loading time. Get precise information here about how the loading time gets affected by WordPress plugins!

Whilst we load small functionality which might not be needed on the site, the code is automatically cached on the content delivery network (CDN) and the result comes with some requests. These requests cater improved performance despite of enormous small JS files loading. You should implement this process regularly as the role of plugins changes the over time.

6. Shorten Image

The big size images may prove to be a cause for slow blog speed, when the vast range of images are available on the site. It would be advisable to choose JPEG for photographic and PNG-8 or GIF for the text. you need to be more careful especially when using the regular PNG form as it might bloat the picture 5-10 times in comparison to JPEG format. Furthermore, you also make sure that the compression in excess can cause “artifacting,”, which is the portion where an image starts to clump.

The easiest way is to move around your image to check that what would happen if compression is performed and what would be its multiple levels. In this way, you’ll quickly understand the best setting for you. With Photoshop or similar type of programs, you may check it out through image resizing, because it never creates any sort of problem.

7. Set Image Size

When it comes to loading the images on WordPress, then the imperative thing is to set the specification of the image like width & height appropriately. If it is not specified before loading, then browser will take time until it is loaded completely. Hence, to save this time, it is necessary to set the height & width which let the browsers allocate enough space for the image.

8. Optimize Website Homepage For Speedily Loading

A few important things that every WordPress site owner must do in order to ensure their homepage loads fast. Homepage is crucial part of a site as it is often visited by people.

Here Are The Key Things That You Must Include:

• You should show excerpts on the homepage rather than displaying the complete posts.
• The presence of maximum posts (in numbers) sometimes makes the page confusing (we will suggest you to show max 5 to 6 posts).
• There is no need to share widgets via homepage; it would be better to include them in the posts only. If any unnecessary widget sharing is running on your website’s homepage, then remove it.
• Remove inactive widgets and plugins that are not required anymore.
• Readers land here to read content, not for a wide range of widgets, so keep them minimum.

According to experts, an impeccable and simple homepage design looks better than the complicated one and even it loads faster.

9. Update WordPress Installation

For several good reasons, it is essential to keep the WordPress installation up to date. With the latest updates, you can fix the bugs and revamp the website’s performance.

10. Cut Down Plugin’s Number From The Site

The best thing about WordPress is it is loaded with manifold plugins. But if you own a website installed with varied plugins, then it may cause to crash. The perfect solution to get rid of this situation is just to keep the significant plugins only and make them updated. Deleting the unnecessary ones is a good solution.

11. Use Impeccable & Simple Theme

This well-noted CMS abounds with numerous theme options including premium & free. Therefore, pick a theme and make sure that it performs smoothly and does not depend completely on the images. However, images enhance the look and feel, but they also affect the page loading speed. Hence, go for a theme which is based on CSS design.

12. Use LazyLoad for Images

LazyLoad process is something that comprises only images just before the fold load. This means only pictures are shown to the visitors in their browser window. Once, the reader scrolls the page down, other images start loading.

It not only speeds up loading of your page, but also saves bandwidth via less data loading. To have it automatically at your site, you just need to install jQuery LazyLoad plugin for the images.

13. Set Front Page

Don’t leave the WordPress site with default setting and try to adjust it for the front page.

Here are the steps to set the front page:

• Go to Settings -> Reading Setting -> set maximum posts to 10.
• Move to the editor -> use <!--more-->tag. It will develop an excerpt on the front page.

14. Turn Trackbacks & Pingbacks Off

WordPress, by default, interacts with the blogs integrated with trackbacks and pingbacks. Almost all the time, other blogs mention you and notify your website that updates your data/content in a proper way. Turning it off does not eradicate your backlinks available on the site, but do the settings in a way that it produces optimal work beyond your expectation for your WordPress site in an effective way.

Before optimization, homepage takes approximately 2.21 seconds to load and after doing this acutely, the page loading time drops to 1.21 seconds which is almost 45% faster, in accordance with Pingdom. During optimization, the website owner is enabled to make the server responsive time faster, improve the performance score of page speed & overall loading time and reduce total HTML requests.

Conclusion

As per the market analysts and global website survey, fast loading sites are more capable of engaging the visitors because such sites urge people to continue their search till they get final result. All people don’t follow the same techniques and strategies. Thus, we research thoroughly and filter all these tactics that definitely speed up the performance of a WordPress website.