5 Super Simple Steps To Speed Up Your WordPress Website
Created by our Partners at WPengine
Speed matters. Seriously. On the web, fractions of a second can make the difference between a sale and a sour experience. Did you know that 40% of site visitors will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load? Or that a one-second delay in page load speed can reduce customer satisfaction by 16%, cause an 11% dip in page views, and lead to a 7% drop in conversion rates? What’s it all mean? It means a slow site does more than annoy visitors; it can hurt revenue.
Speed is important. So what can you do to ensure your WordPress site is snappy? Here are five super-simple steps you can take to improve the speed of your WordPress site and keep your audience from abandoning it in frustration.
Optimize Your Images
Images are often the culprit when it comes to a sluggish site. High-resolution images, using the wrong file types, and overstuffing your site with graphics can hog bandwidth and make for a super slow experience. There are a host of solutions available to help you optimize images to ensure they don’t bog your site down. One way to serve images more swiftly is by compressing them in a lossless way, meaning that the file size— and, in turn, the load time—will be smaller, but the quality of the image won’t suffer. Fewer images that are less bulky will have your site screaming.
Minification
This one may sound a little geeky, but it’s a relatively simple way to give your site a speed injection: minification is essentially the process of removing all of the unnecessary characters and whitespace from source code without changing the code’s functionality. You can minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which makes the code easier to read and your site faster. There are a number of minification plugins, such as WP Rocket, that can streamline your code and ultimately put the pedal to the metal on your site.
Use a CDN
A CDN, or content delivery network, is a proven way to boost your site’s speed. A CDN is a global network of servers that automatically serves site visitors static content such as images, JavaScript, stylesheets, and more, from a server that is geographically closer to them. This improves site speed because global visitors receive static content from the geographically closest server, reducing the latency between the browser and the server—a CDN is an instant speed booster.
Choose The Right Theme
A badly-coded theme can make your site move like molasses. Try not to purchase any themes or use free themes. A very well-developed theme is best. Themes are often a few megabytes in size, which can add seconds to page loading time. When investigating themes, look at ones that have been optimized for both desktops and mobile devices. Also, look for themes to provide the visual aspect of your site and leave additional functionality to plugins. The right theme makes all the difference. WP Engine’s Genesis-built Premium WordPress Themes, for example, are mobile-optimized, and they’re among the most popular themes for WordPress because they look great and can actually speed up your site as opposed to slowing it down.
Reduce HTTP requests
Each request adds a small fraction of a second to your site’s load speed. While that doesn’t seem like much, those minuscule moments add up. Think about it. When someone visits a page on your site, all of the corresponding files must be sent to that person’s browser. That’s images, CSS files, JavaScript—you name it. Think of it this way: an HTML file, two CSS files, five JavaScript files, and 10 images add up to 18 total files. Reducing the number of objects on your site can minimize the number of HTTP requests required for that page to render. Fewer requests equals more speed!
Why WPengine?
Those are just a few of the simple steps you can make to speed up your site. At WP Engine, we’re site speed experts. Our WordPress Digital Experience Platform was built from the ground up to deliver blazing site speeds. Our proprietary EverCache® technology transforms normal WordPress sites into speedy, scalable online properties—for many of our customers, EverCache makes their sites run four to six times faster. Plus, our fully managed CDN stores your site’s static content locally on servers all over the world, and then serves content to your visitors from the servers closest to them, reducing latency by seconds. For us, performance is a product that’s never finished. We’re constantly working to provide all of our customers—from shared to dedicated plans—with faster response times across their sites. This includes helping our customers run up-to-date versions of PHP, improving page loading times, and providing access to things like next-gen infrastructure from Google.
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Categorised in: The Shoreline Blog
This post was written by Shoreline Content Team
