6 Ways To Increase The Page Speed Of Your WordPress Website

The page speed of your website is very important for several reasons.  Here are 6 ways you can increase the page speed of your WordPress website

Most people’s first interaction with your business, organization or brand is through your website. Usually, the first quality factor that users see on your site is your page speed, or how quickly your page loads. As a result, page speed is very important for a couple of reasons.

First, the quicker your web page loads, the better experience your visitors will have on your site. This translates into more traffic and in many cases, more conversions and more sales.

Second, page speed is a ranking factor for Google and most of the major search engines. The quicker your page speed, the higher your search engine rankings. Your search engine rankings greatly impact the amount of traffic directed to your site.

Improving the speed of your website helps your search engine rankings, your visitor’s user experience, in many cases traffic directed to your site, conversions, and sales.

Here are six factors that can improve the speed of your WordPress website.

1. Smaller is (sometimes) better

Bigger is not always better, especially when it comes to the size of your web pages. Giving all of your information to your users is often not the most important factor. Giving them the right content is far more important.

The goal is having the right balance of content including photography, videos, text, icons, social media widgets and so on that is delivered as quickly as possible across all devices and browsers.

As of June 2016, the average size of a web page is a bit more than 2.2 MB. By comparison, the average page size in 2010 was over 700 KB. Over the last six years, the average size of a web page has increased over 3 times or 317%.

Should you manage to streamline your page to less than 2.2 megabytes, it will mean two things:

1. Your site will load faster for mobile visitors. Keep in mind that for most sites, nearly have their traffic will come from mobile devices. To convert mobile traffic into sales, you need a site that loads fast.
2. The site is likely more focused, possibly resulting in a higher search engine ranking.
3. For e-commerce websites, an increase in loading time leads directly to a decrease in revenue.

2. Caching

“Caching” is how your web server (page cache) and your web browser (browser cache) store your content to be delivered to your visitors as quickly as possible. Most online speed tests such as GTMetrix and Google Speed Test test for caching and they will tell you if you are not caching content on your site correctly.

If you are using WordPress, there are several plugins available that can implement caching on your site. They include:

• W3 Total Cache
• Autoptimize
• WP Rocket (paid)

Some web hosts provide caching as part of their service offerings.

3. Minify your code

To minify a file means to limit excess code from your website files so that they are as compressed as possible. Usually, Javascript, cascading style sheets (CSS) and HTML file are minified.

Fortunately “minified” files are an easy thing to check for and can be done through the caching plugins listed above. There are also specialized plugins available that will only minify your files.

Be careful when minifying files on your site because it can result in display issues if it is not done correctly. To check your source code, you can right click on most web pages, in most browsers and select ‘view source’.

4. Optimize your images

Serving optimized images on your site is one of the biggest opportunities to improve page load times. By optimizing your images, you scale and compress your images and is one of the best items to do regular maintenance on.

A scaled image is sized correctly for the resolution at which it is actually displayed. Ideally, your image files should have a natural image size that is the same as the display dimension for each image. In other words, if the image size you would like to display is 350×150 pixels, the image in its natural state should be 350×150 pixels. When the dimensions of your image are something like 1050×450 pixels and you resize your image on your site to show at something like 350×150, your images are not scaled.

In addition to resizing your images, it is important to compress them is well. Image compression is minimizing the size in bytes of a graphics file without degrading the quality of the image to an unacceptable level. The reduction in file size allows more images to be stored in a given amount of disk or memory space.

If your website is built using WordPress, there are several plugins available that can help manage this process. Such plugins include:

• Smushit
• Ewww

If you don’t want to use WordPress plugins, there is a second option. You can resize your images manually in an image editor like Photoshop or Microsoft Paint and then use a compression tool to compress your images.

5. Remove render-blocking elements

An issue that is common with most older themes is that they often have several ‘Render Blocking” elements that may be slowing your page speed down.

In other words, there may be some site elements such as some fonts or sliders that need to be loaded before a page can be fully displayed. To get around this, you can adjust the order to defer loading until needed. This will enable you to avoid getting these errors with the result being a faster loading website. However, sometimes this isn’t always possible because of functionality constraints.

Some common items that could render blocking include:

• Light boxes
• Videos
• Fonts
• Carousels and sliders
• Stylesheets (CSS)
• Chat
• Conversion and site tracking scripts

Some of the optimization plugins mentioned earlier will help address this issue. However, it is preferable for this to be developed natively to prevent a display issue.

6. Hosting

As long as your investing in your website and your brand, you might as well invest in a quality web host as well. There are many very good hosts out there from which to choose from. One that we have had a good experience with is WPEngine.

What is one of the best indicators of how well your web host is doing?

Answer: Response times and servers first byte.

In this example, response time and time to first byte is not too bad. You want this number to be low because it means that users are connecting with your web server quickly. Beware of warnings and if your site keeps experiencing server outages, you may want to start looking for another hosting provider.

Wrapping it all up

I hope you have learned 6 ways to increase the page speed of your WordPress website.  If this is something you don’t want to take on yourself, we can help you as part of our WordPress maintenance service.  This service includes WordPress security, backups, plugin updates, local SEO, and much more.