WordPress is the number one tool when it comes to building websites. The large number of plugins, add-ons, and themes, in addition to its high level of customization, means that approximately 43% of all websites in the world use it.
However, this strength is also its weakness; such a high level of customization makes it easier for beginners to make certain mistakes and overload their websites with too many “extras” that make them slower and even prone to crashes.
If you have a WordPress site that isn’t performing as well or as fast as it should, you need to optimize your website, and this guide will help you get started in no time.
Why A Fast Website Is Important
The average time it takes for a user to do a search on Google is quite short; the user clicks on the first results, quickly scans the information, and if they don’t find what they are looking for, they go to another site. Total time = 5 seconds.
This means that if your website takes more than that time to load, you’ll lose users.
In fact, according to Google, a load time between 1 and 3 seconds increases the bounce rate by 32%, a percentage that increases with load time (2).
In other words, if your website is optimized and its load time is less than 3 seconds, you get:
- Higher conversion rate – Users won’t leave your site without at least looking for the information they want.
- Better user experience – Users will have a positive perception of your brand.
- Return on investment – The more users visit your website, the more likely you’re to sell them something.
- Indexing – Google crawlers index pages with higher loading speeds more easily.
What Slows Down A WordPress Website?
There are many factors that can slow down WordPress, but in this guide, you’ll learn about the main ones so you can start working on them today.
Too Many Plugins
Sometimes it is unavoidable to install a large number of plugins, but remember that the more plugins you install, the slower your website will load. The probability of incompatibilities also increases.
Unoptimized Images
As with plugins, the larger the number and size of images, the slower they will load.
Third-party Scripts
Third-party scripts cannot be optimized and often slow down WordPress quite a bit. The best solution is to use as few of them as possible.
A Slow Or Heavy Theme
Some themes are beautiful and spectacular, but generally, the more “graphical” a theme is, the more resources it consumes and the slower it is.
Poor Quality Hosting
A slow and poor-quality host will end up affecting your pocket sooner or later. Even though some options allow you to save a few dollars a year, you’ll end up paying more when hosting makes your website crash or run slower.
These speed drops will cause you to lose rankings, conversions, and money. For that reason, you should never hesitate to use a quality host, specifically targeted at WordPress websites.
Making Your WordPress Site More Efficient
Now that you know the importance of having a fast and optimized WordPress website, here are some of the best tips you can follow.
Take Advantage Of Test Environments
A test environment is a physical or virtual environment made up of storage, memory, computing power, and other resources, that allows you to analyze the performance of your website.
This allows you to find and eliminate bugs that may be affecting the proper functioning of your site in a safe environment before applying the changes to your website.
Control The Number Of Plugins You Us
Controlling both the quality and the number of installed plugins is essential to make your website more efficient.
Avoid including more than 20 plugins on your website. Also note that some themes already include some plugin functionality.
Make Sure Plugins And WordPress Version Are Up To Date:
Many of the bugs that the WordPress community fixes are related to efficiency and speed. If you want to take advantage of this and avoid compatibility problems, it’s essential to keep the theme and plugins updated as well.
Find A Fast-hosting Company With Optimal Load Times And Uptime:
Just to give you a little idea of how important loading speed is on a website, pay attention to some stats from Unbounce:
- “Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed influences their likeliness to buy.”
- “Half of all people say they’d be willing to give up animation and video for faster load times.”
- “Of the consumers living in New York, 82% admit that speed influences their decision to make a purchase”
But no matter how many tweaks you make to your WordPress site, if your hosting company doesn’t provide speed, you’ll lose potential customers.
Keep in mind that different types of servers influence different performances on your site, since each one has a different capacity.
The best WordPress hosting will be the one that provides you with optimal load times and uptime, so always focus on quality.
Enable Your Cache
Enabling caching on your website will make your site’s content load faster for returning users. This is because the cache stores part of your site in the user’s browser, so they don’t have to load all the information again.
Use External Sites For Audio And Video
By optimizing your images, you manage to improve the loading speed of your website. With videos, audios or documents, things can get a bit complicated, mainly due to the volume of content that you can have in each format.
It’s better that you use external platforms – such as YouTube for videos – to upload your content and not affect the performance of your WordPress website.
Optimize Your Database
Although WordPress offers the possibility of saving everything automatically, including revisions, trackbacks, comments to be approved, etc., this will sooner or later end up saturating your database and slowing down your website.
Use one of the many plugins available to manage your database more efficiently.