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Of all the platforms, WordPress is considered to be the best; however, some activities can make it slow. Without implementing the right measures, your site could end up becoming sluggish.
This is a big mess, especially for visitors who are impatient these days. It can make you lose many visitors as well as subscribers who are your potential customers.
Today’s internet users seem to be in a hurry and when they cannot get what they want from your site within a few minutes (or even seconds) of waiting, they end up walking away from it.
Having a lightning speed WordPress site can increase conversions, enhance your site usability and also boost your site SEO rankings.
Note that when a visitor bumps into your site, you need to swiftly capture their attention and make them continue scrolling down your website pages.
Why Speed up your WordPress Site?
There are many reasons why you should be concerned when your site starts becoming sluggish and some of the reasons why you need to speed up WordPress are:
- Your site will get better Google rankings if its loading speed is higher (site speed is a ranking signal on Google). Therefore to make your site appear on the first pages of SERPs, work on your WordPress site speed.
- Visitors are more likely to hang around your site if your site has a fast-loading time. So, ensure your site has faster loading speed to make your visitors want to scroll your pages more and more.
- Online customers lose patience more quickly on a site that is slow. So, ensure your site pages load in less than a second.
How to Speedup your WordPress Site
Now that you have known why you should speed up your WordPress, how do you do it?
Read with us to know how!
1. Choose a good Web Hosting Partner
The hosting of your WordPress site can have a huge impact on the loading speed of your site. Many a time, website owners choose to use a shared hosting provider to cut down on cost but this can turn to be an expensive approach in the long run.
While cutting down on cost is a desire for any business owner, choosing a shared hosting provider can lead to low site speed and regular downtime especially when the site is experiencing high traffic.
Shared hosting providers allocate the same server space to other multiple websites and this affects the performance. For WordPress, cloud hosting or a managed WordPress hosting is the great. Here are some companies that offer Best Web Hosting.
2. Optimize your Homepage to increase the loading-speed
The homepage is the first point on your website where your visitors will land. You need to capture their attention within a blink of an eye so that they can hang around. But this will happen if you have a fast-loading home page. To optimize your home page for faster loading, you should:
- Display excerpts in place of full posts
- Minimize the posts displayed on your homepage to about 5-6 posts
- Get rid of needless sharing widgets from your site’s homepage
- Get rid of unnecessary plugins and widgets that are inactive
- Ensure everything is minimized.
Having a clean home page is a good way to show you are a professional in what you do and can increase loading speed.
3. Speed up your WordPress by optimizing Images
Having huge files that are not optimized or compressed can also lower your WordPress speed. It is therefore good to ensure every image you upload is optimized.
While this might be a time-consuming exercise, it is rewarding in the long run. Technology has advanced and this can be done using some good plugins such as WP Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer.
Some of these plugins are even free so you don’t have to couch out money to use them. Utilizing these and many other plugins on your WordPress site will drastically minimize image sizes and hence boost your site speed.
Final thoughts
The biggest benefit of increasing your WordPress speed and decreasing loading times is that your visitor’s user-experience is enhanced and this applies to both users whether on mobile or on PCs. Additionally, your site rankings in the SERPs will also improve.
