7 effective ways to boost Your WordPress Speed & Performance

As you want to increase your WordPress site performance? Fast loading pages and website improve user experience, visitor and page view, and help with your business growth and overall ROI.

In this article, I will share some easy tips to improve your WordPress website speed & performance. But before starting the article do you ever think why speed matter so much to engaged your visitors and why it is an important factor to keep in mind when you run your business online.

Don’t panic, I tried to cover everything from why speed is important to what slows down WordPress site speeds to how to improve your WordPress speed quickly.

Why Speed is Matters for your WordPress Website?

There are numerous studies and survey that highlight how site loading speed effect user experience when a user land on your website for the first time, you have only a few seconds to catch their attention and convince them to browse your site and hang around.

As user don't like to wait for ages for a web page to load when it is so easy to navigate your competitors' website within seconds.

To shed more light on how slow loading and sluggish site speed might be demolition not only the visitor’s experience on your site but also your conversion rate and Overall business presence.

After all, slow website performance kills a business bottom line and turns your visitors into a frustrated one.

According to research conducted by Akamai and Gomez founds that

• 47% of people expect your web page to load in two seconds
• 40% will switch to an alternative if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• 52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loading important for their loyalty to the site.
•  64% of visitors who are dissatisfied by your website speed will go somewhere else to shop next time.
• 23% will stop shopping and leave your website and walk away from their accessing device and 14% will move to your competitor's site to shop.

A 2010 report conduct by Gomez, titled “Why Web Performance matters: is your site driving customers away?”, that interviewed approx. 1500 customers to know about how the site performance and speed impact their shopping experience, revealed the following facts:

•  More than 75% 0f online customers move to other sites rather than suffer delay.

•  88% of user less likely to back to site after encounter first bad experience.

•  More than a third told others about their experience with a website.

In brief, having a slow website speed will negatively impact the following aspects of your business

•   Page view
•   Traffic
•   Conversion rate
•    Sales
•    User-interaction
•    Your brand image and perception in the mind of the user.

Not only that but, Google includes site speed as one of its ranking algorithms.SO Slow site speed will affect your SEO, In turn, reduce ranking in search engine. Yeak!!

To sum it all up, if you want traffic, subscription, and revenue from your website, then you have to make your website FAST & FASTER!!!

Before fixing it, First, go and check your present website speed via Pingdom or Google PageSpeedInsight or Web page Analyser.

Just put your website URL here and check what results you get from the speed test.

Important note: A good page load speed is under 2 second.

A few milliseconds change here and there add up to cut off half or even a full second from load time.

Some primary causes who slow down your WordPress Website:

These are some common causes who make your website slower

•   Bad plugin and unnecessary plugin.
•   Large images and page size.
•  Too much external scripts.
•   Poor web hosting.
•   Don’t have proper caching and WordPress Configuration.
• Too much animation
•   Poorly coded WordPress Theme

let’s take a look at how to boost your WordPress website speed & performance. Ready to read? start with step 1:

How to speed up your WordPress website performance

1.      Choose a better Web host

Your web host is a very important factor when it comes to website performance. if you plan on publishing popular stuff of your WordPress site on shared hosting means if you share the server resources with many others customers and if your neighbour website is getting so much traffic then in case of shared hosting it will turn down your website speed.so invest in proper hosting like Siteground or Flywheel and WPEngine.

2.      Optimize Your Images size

Unoptimized images take longer to load and reduce loading time. if your images size is 1mb or 2mb+ then you have some serious work to do.

Let’s check out the best WordPress image compression plugins without sacrificing your image quality.

3.      Start with a faster WordPress theme/framework

Exactly you might be surprised here that WordPress theme plays a special role in speed optimization. some beautiful and attractive themes are poorly coded and slow down your site.

It's better to go with a simpler theme like Twenty Nineteen theme rather than choosing a theme with unnecessary features. you can also go with a premium WordPress theme like Themify, Studiopress, CssIgniter these themes are nicely coded and reduce loading time.

If still, you are in a dilemma how to switch to your WordPress then choose WordPress Development Services provider to get an optimized result.

4.      Remove unused plugins and find slow plugins

Too many plugins and extra bytes plugin, the addon can reduce your website speed A lot and it may be the main culprit to slow load time.

On the other hand case study about the impact of good quality plugin shows that how we able to take Speed from 4.20 second to 1.33 second by using a powerful and compatible plugin to your website.

Read a common guide to how to maintain the plugin and keep that up to date. also, you can install WP Fastest Cache. This plugin will improve loading speed significantly decrease in bounce rate.

Before removing and updating the plugin, don't forget to backup your WordPress site ( I recommend BackUpBuddy).

5.      Use a CDN (Content delivery network)

using a content delivery network can help to speed up loading time for all your visitors, No matter which geographical locations they are locating.

A content delivery network takes all your static file(CSS, JavaScript , images ,etc ) and every time a user visit your website, no matter from which location CDN enable visitors to download all static file of as fast as possible by serving the file on the server which is close to their server.

You can use Cloudflare CDN service for best result.

6.      Don’t upload Video/Audio file directly to WordPress

Hosting large Audio and video files to your website will cost you bandwidth and also increase your Backup size and make it difficult for you to back Up your site.

WordPress has built-in video embed features, so you can just have to paste your Video URL directly into your post and it will embed directly.

7.      Disable leeching of your content

If you have good content on your Website, then sooner or later it’ll probably get stolen, hot linking and leeching means a form of bandwidth “theft”.it occur when other websites directly links to the images on your site, in turn, it increases several load on your site and you won't be able to see traffic on site.

To prevent this, you have to put codes in your .htaccess file and you can read the guide How to prevent Hotlink in WordPress, which is worth reading.

Wrapping It UP

As you probably know that everyone loves to visit a fast website. I hope that this speed-up guide was helpful and you can apply some of few things to Your WordPress Website to boost up your WordPress Speed & Performance .if so, please take a moment to share it.

In case if I miss something important to mention, then Let me know your speed up WordPress tactics below in the comment.

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