In research conducted by Wyzowl, they found that the human attention span has significantly decreased over the years. In 2000, the average human span was 12 seconds, and now, it shrunk significantly to 8.25 seconds. For marketers, this is crucial because it means that we only now have 8.25 seconds to catch the attention of our target audience with our website. This is why it is important to improve the speed of your WordPress website.
Ideally, you will want your WordPress website’s loading speed to be less than three seconds. If it’s higher than that, then each second, you lose a large percentage of your target audience leaving your website. And to help with this, below are seven expert tips on how to improve the speed of your WordPress website from us at Cybertegic, a digital marketing agency in Pasadena.
1 – Use a lightweight theme.
WordPress themes have many different elements, including layouts, widgets, sliders, social icons, and other designs to make your website look attractive to online visitors. However, you need to remember that if your website has too many elements, it will take longer for your website to load. This will then significantly affect the loading speed of your website.
Thus, the best advice here is to choose a lightweight theme for your WordPress website. Here are the most lightweight themes you can apply to your website:
- GeneratePress
- Divi
- Astra
- Schema
- OceanWP
- StudioPress
2 – Optimize your images.
Images and other visual contents help engage your visitors. It brings life to your website. But most of the time, people mistake uploading image files with large sizes, which takes too much time to load. Thus, optimizing your image is a crucial step to improve your website speed. This includes compressing image files and resizing them so they can load quickly.
You can also install an image optimization plugin. The best plugins are Smush, Imagify, Optimus, EWWW Image Optimizer, and Optimal. Once it has optimized all of your uploaded images, the next step you need to do is to upload smaller file-size images on your future content. For example, JPEG images load faster than PNG or GIF images.
3 – Enable caching on your website.
WordPress has dynamic pages. Each page is built on the spot every time a user visits a post or page on your website. And each time, WordPress has to run a process to load all the information and display it to the user. This process consists of several steps and can take a lot of time to load, which causes your website to slow down. That’s why you should use a caching plugin for your WordPress site.
WordPress caching plugins make the complex process of loading all the information faster. It does this by storing your site data locally in temporary storage spaces that are called caches. This way, the user’s browser will load your site files faster and more efficiently. This can significantly improve your website’s loading speeds, mainly when the user has visited your site for the second time. One of the most recommended caching plugins you can install on your WordPress Site is W3 Total Cache.
4 – Always keep your website updated.
WordPress is a blogging platform that is updated frequently. Each update doesn’t only add new features to your website, but it also includes fixes on bugs and security issues from previous versions. Aside from your website’s WordPress version, you should keep your WordPress theme updated as well. These updates usually optimize the layouts and all of its design elements so it can load faster.
Make it a priority for your website designer or web developer to update the WordPress version and theme.
5 – Optimize for mobile.
Since Google launched its mobile-first indexing update, this search engine now indexes and prioritizes crawling websites that are mobile-friendly. So if your WordPress website is not mobile-friendly, you are probably losing a lot of traffic and potential sales in the process. Not only that, but it will also be harder for your website and its landing pages to earn a spot in Google’s top search results.
The easiest way to turn your WordPress website into a mobile-friendly site is by using a responsive theme. This will make sure that your website will run and display perfectly on any mobile device. You can also use a plugin called “WordPress AMP.” This creates AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) versions of your website’s pages which load instantly on mobile devices.
6 – Update your plugins.
Outdated plugins in your WordPress website can affect your site performance and slow down your loading speed. This is why it is vital to keep all of your plugins updated and compatible with your WordPress site version. Similar to your WordPress version and themes, these plugins release updates that fix bugs and optimize the program to run better on your website. So the latest version your plugin has, the better.
Another tip is to check before and after installing one using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This will tell you the impact of the plugin you have just installed on your website’s speed and help you decide whether the plugin slows down your website tremendously or not. If it is, you can choose whether its functionality is worth the sacrifice.
7 – Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Users in different geographical locations can experience different loading times on your website. This is because it depends on where your website hosting servers are located. For example, if your WordPress website uses a hosting service with its servers in the United States, an online visitor from the US will load your website faster than an online visitor from Asia.
That is why website developers often recommend the use of CDN or Content Delivery Network. It is a network made up of several servers all around the world. Each server will store the static files of your website, so every time a user from the country visits it, your website will load faster. Not only that, since the CDN already has your static files in-store, your own website hosting service will also be able to load your website faster.
Sources:
