A fast website is required if you intend to provide a great user experience for your WordPress website visitors and also rank well on different search engines across the web. To achieve a fast loading time, your website must load within 3 seconds. If your website is not meeting up to these standards this means you stand a high chance of getting an increase in bounce rate which may affect your traffic and revenue in the long run. Certainly, you don’t want to go this path.
Reasons you need a fast WordPress website ?
The internet we know today moves very quickly and everyone wants to get information as fast as possible. However, to stay ahead of the curve your website must display information or content in the shortest possible time to convince your visitors about what you have to offer.
A slow website means visitors or shoppers may potentially leave your site before it even loads. According to analysts, 18% of shoppers will abandon their shopping cart if a web page is slow to load.
In the effort to provide relevant content and good user experience for search engine users, Google and other search engines giants already have an algorithm in place to rank websites that loads faster and penalize slower loading websites by ranking them low in their search results this means lesser traffic for slow loading WordPress sites.
If you need excellent traffic for your WordPress website, then you must take some deliberate steps to turbocharge your website to make it load faster. Before we go through some of the ways you can speed up your WordPress website, you may want to conduct a quick check to see how fast your website loads up.
Checking Your WordPress Website Speed ?
It is highly recommended to frequently check your website speed and monitor your WordPress site load time in order to keep providing a streamlined experience for your website visitors. One of the ways you can check your website speed is by using a free online tool Like Get Metrix.
We highly recommend Get Metrix because it runs through a series of highlights of optimization that can be carried out to improve your website load time. The faster your website the better your search engine ranking, quality score, and also your website user experience.
Although if you are experiencing a slow loading time on your WordPress website, a series of factors might be responsible for the issue, these include your web host, customized code snippet, poorly developed plugins, malware, and your page size. In this blog post, we have outlined 3 steps that you can take to improve your website speed.
1. Regularly updating your themes and plugins ?
Providing regular updates for your plugin and theme gives your website access to improved functionalities and optimized performance. Updates may also include regular security patches and bug fixes which can help secure your website and make it work smoothly.
Doing a regular update on your WordPress website, theme and plugins ensure that your website is not only secured but optimized as well for performance.
If you run a WordPress website you might have noticed that it depends completely on the database for it to function, most actions carried out on a WordPress website are saved on a database from plugin installation to blog post, tags, and comments. Over time, this data might litter your database when not in use and cause your website to slow down significantly. Most of the time when plugins are uninstalled the database tables are left behind with data which can easily add up quickly and cause performance issues for your website. If your WordPress website has been running for a while there are good chances that you may need to optimize your database.
At WP Rapids we use a premium plugin for regular database optimization for our clients.? However, this can also be achieved with other plugins like WP-Optimize. this enhanced cleaning of unused tags, posts, and general optimization for your database performance. It also comes with loads of features in the premium version.
3. Use WordPress Caching Plugin ?
One of the ways of making your WordPress site load faster is by doing a web page caching. Before we go further, let us explain to you what web page caching does. Web page caching is the process of creating a static copy of your WordPress website content and serving it to your site visitors without having to query your database for content if nothing has changed. When a WordPress website site is cached, it means the site contents are stored on your website visitors’ local hard disk. Generally when a WordPress website is accessed from your browser a series of queries are sent back and forth from the WordPress website database to retrieve the requested page content for the user, by using caching techniques multiple queries to your database are avoided which can lead to faster load time. With the use of a WordPress caching plugin, your website speed can be increased drastically.
There are lots of good WordPress caching plugins out there both free and premium. But we’ll recommend you check out WP Rocket which is a premium plugin that offers great solutions and features like database optimization, CDN, page caching, browser caching, and lots more.
Before trying out any of these options on your website, you may want to test your website speed on Get Metrix so you are able to compare your previous and present website speed.
Conclusion
You have seen from the article the importance of a fast website and the need for optimizing your WordPress site for speed. If you’re planning to improve the experience of your website visitor and revenue then certainly you need optimization as soon as possible. You can check out our maintenance plan. We hope this optimization option was helpful to someone. You can let us know what you’re doing to speed up your WordPress site by sharing your tips below in the comment area. We currently provide 24/7 WordPress management and maintenance service for your WordPress website. You’re welcome to contact us if you need any help in boosting your WordPress website speed.
