You’re ecstatic that your first site is finished.
This comes after days of deliberation over the best design, followed by weeks of production and endless hours of editing.
But then you run into a major issue: you’ve just noticed that your new, stunning website is not really loading as quickly as you’d like.
The reality that you’ve read that quick loading pages boost page views, improve user experience, and aid WordPress SEO is the foundation of your worry.
When it comes to increasing conversion rates and optimizing a website for search engines, speed is crucial.
Boosting the performance of the website is critical for attracting visitors and keeping them engaged.
All of this means that if your website isn’t fast enough, visitors will leave before you can say jack.
However, optimizing your website is no simple task.
It’s not always easy to figure out what’s prompting your website to load slowly.
Large page elements, badly written code or images may all be the source of your issue.
And you must diagnose and resolve these problems quickly.
Do you want to make your website load faster?
You should be aware that the speed of your website creates the first impression for your brand
It’s critical to recognize that when it comes to user experience, there are no second chances.
One of the most aggravating factors that can turn people away from your site is slow website speed.
We’ll try to share the most valuable website speed optimization techniques in this post to help you boost WordPress performance and speed up your blog.
How to Speed up Your Website
1. Move your website to a good host
Web hosting is, in my opinion, is among the most crucial decisions you’ll have to consider when it comes to hosting a website.
There are only two types of web hosts: good and great.
You’re probably renting server space from a hosting provider except if you understand how to develop servers yourself.
Look for essential elements like proprietary caching technologies, solid-state drives, or control over critical areas like NGINX that each web host would have.
Having a good web host is something that can’t be stressed enough.
It’s vital that you choose the right web host.
While it’s fine to start with relatively inexpensive shared hosting, however when you begin receiving traffic, you’ll need to ensure your hosting can keep up with the demands.
The kind of hosting you use is the very first factor to consider here:
- Shared hosting – is exactly what it sounds like. You share a server with a lot of other websites, and they’re all fighting for the same resources like RAM and CPU power.
- Dedicated hosting — with dedicated hosting, you have complete control over your server’s setup, hardware, and other aspects. Nevertheless, to handle it, you’ll need tech knowledge or money to hire somebody who does.
- Cloud hosting – The fastest-growing type of hosting is cloud hosting. Cloud computing is based on a pay-per-use model, which means you can utilize as much or as little processing power as you need. It’s great for traffic spikes, but it’s also more expensive.
- VPS hosting — Similar to shared hosting, but with fewer other websites on the same machine and everybody getting their respective dedicated processing resources that cannot be exceeded.
- Managed hosting — this is a type of hosting that is especially useful for WordPress, and it is when the web host handles the majority of the hosting duties. This covers aspects such as security, backups, and performance. With managed hosting, you can focus entirely on the development of your website. However, this type of service comes at a cost.
If you’re not familiar with them, check out our in-depth reviews of the best web hosting services to help you make an informed choice.
2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The term CDN is an abbreviation for “content delivery network.”
These are a collection of servers located all over the world.
They’re made to host and deliver static (and sometimes dynamic) information like JavaScript, images, video streams, and CSS from your WordPress site.
It’s important to understand that a CDN is not equivalent to your website host.
These are two distinct services.
A CDN isn’t a substitute for your hosting provider; instead, it’s an extra way to boost your site’s speed.
While most hosting providers, such as Bluehost, Siteground, and DreamHost, offer lightning-fast service, a CDN can help your site run even faster.
How does a CDN Works?
What is a CDN and how does it work?
When you host your website with Bluehost, Siteground, or DreamHost, for example, you must select a physical data center location, such as Asia-Pacific, United States, South America, or Europe.
Let’s say you pick one of the servers in the United States.
This indicates that your website is physically hosted on a server in the United States.
When users from Asia visit your website, it will take much longer for it to load than if they were visiting from, say, California in the United States
What is the reason for this? This is because the information must travel a greater distance.
This is referred to as latency.
The timeframe and/or delay required in data transmission over a network is referred to as latency.
The longer the distance between two points, the longer the latency.
Another advantage of using a CDN is that server load can be spread across multiple servers rather than just one.
This reduces the chances of download speeds slowing down during peak traffic periods.
Another significant advantage of using a CDN is enhanced security as CDN servers are capable of mitigating DDoS attacks.
They have built-in defenses against such assaults.
Despite the fact that the best web hosting providers employ strong DDoS defenses, a well-planned attack could still knock a single server down with minimal effort.
The existence of a server network that manages incoming traffic lessens traffic floods, so a CDN can help offset the traffic influx.
Furthermore, if your site is down for maintenance, the CDN servers will still serve cached versions of it to end-users, significantly improving overall uptime.
3. Reduce image size
Large images are the most common causes of sluggish pages and low scores.
However, deleting them completely is not an alternative.
Because of this, we at WebHost Bros don’t use huge file sizes.
Compression is one of the most popular methods for reducing image size.
Using basic compression tools, you can reduce the size of your images by as much as 50% or more.
If you’re using WordPress, using a plugin is one of the most efficient ways to accomplish this.
WP Smush Image Compression and Optimization is one of our favorite plugins to use.
WP Smush is a free WordPress plugin with a ton of useful features.
By installing, this plugin you can automatically smush images. It will query your WordPress media library for files that can be compressed.
If you like to upload a large number of new images for your website at once, you can do so directly into the plugin.
It is among the fastest tools on the market because it can smush up to 50 images at once.
WP Smush is a fantastic, free tool for regular WordPress users.
But what if you don’t want to use WordPress?
There are a plethora of other plugins available for various websites.
You can use Crush.pics, for example, if you have a Shopify store and website.
Begin compressing your photos and increasing your page speed with this free Shopify plugin.
You can use free online tools like Optimizilla, Img2go, Compress JPEG, and others if you aren’t familiar with plugins or don’t want to use them for your web.
Both are quick and free tools that can resize up to 20 images in one upload.
4. Make use of caching
If I had to provide you with a single answer about how to speed up your website, caching would most likely be it.
Would you like to have a site that loads quickly and responds to your visitors? It’s impossible to say no to caching.
Caching, in general, refers to the process of storing portions or the entirety of your website so that it can be accessed and loaded faster.
Your web pages can load quickly thanks to fast data transmission from your server to the user’s browser.
You can see why enabling caching is a good way to speed up the loading of web pages.
Let’s say a user likes to go to your homepage and enters the URL into the browser.
When the server accepts the request, it estimates the page parameters and sends the requested data to the client.
To process this request, the server must perform a series of tasks, each of which takes time (milliseconds at most) and resources.
Let’s pretend that a few minutes later, another user requests the same homepage.
Because the new request is identical to the previous one, the server already understands what to provide because it has the answer, the entire page, stored in its cache memory.
It is not required to perform the complex calculations once more.
Rather, it merely sends the response to the browser.
As you would expect, this aids in website speed.
The server responds to the second browser with a static HTML file, which is essentially a preview of your homepage.
The content provided is identical in both cases, but the second time the server delivers it is much faster.
5. Use third-party sites to upload audio/video files
You can upload audio and video files straight to your WordPress site, and it will play them in an HTML5 player…
That is, nonetheless, something you should never do!
You’ll have to pay for bandwidth if you want to host audio and video.
Even though your plan contains “unlimited” bandwidth, your web hosting company may charge you overage fees or even shut down your site entirely.
Hosting large media documents also increases the size of your backups, making it more complicated to restore WordPress from backup.
Rather, get audio and video hosting services such as DailyMotion, Vimeo, SoundCloud, YouTube, and others to handle the heavy lifting.
They have the necessary bandwidth!
Because WordPress has a built-in video embed functionality, you can simply copy and paste the URL of your video into your post, and it will immediately embed.
6. Use fast loading theme optimized for speed
It’s critical to pay close attention to speed optimization when choosing a theme for your website.
Some themes that appear to be amazingly beautiful and stunning are actually poorly coded and can cause your site to load slowly.
It’s generally preferable to pick a simpler theme over one that’s overloaded with flashy animations, complicated layouts, and other needless features.
You can still use high-quality WordPress plugins to add those features.
Premium WordPress theme stores such as Themify, StudioPress, and CSSIgniter sell well-coded and speed-optimized themes.
7. Use lazy loading for images
Another way to speed up page loading time is to avoid loading images all at once — at least until they become visible to the user.
Lazy loading is a key method for speeding up image-focused websites or blog posts with a lot of images.
This can be clearly seen if you are to visit a medium post with lots of images.
You will notice that the images do not just load all at once, rather they load as soon as you scroll to where the images are.
Even if the majority of the page takes a few seconds to load, you can increase the user experience by making your above-the-fold section load faster.
As an example, suppose you write a blog post with 20 pictures. A user’s browser would normally have to download all of those images before displaying anything on the page.
It will load the information within view initially, then all of the images after that, thanks to lazy loading.
The user won’t have to wait long to get to the page, and the images will load as they appear.
This will drastically decrease the amount of time it takes for posts with a lot of images to load.
It’s also as simple as installing a plugin if you’re using WordPress for your website. You have a variety of options for implementing lazy loading on your website.
8. Minify your HTML
Minifying code entails eliminating something that the computer doesn’t require to grasp and execute.
This entails commas, whitespace, code comments, and semicolons that aren’t needed.
This reduces the size of CSS and JavaScript files, allowing them to load faster in the browser and consume less bandwidth.
Minification can only result in minor speed gains on its own.
However, when used in conjunction with the other suggestions, it will improve website performance.
Things are even simpler with WordPress.
You don’t need to be a coding genius to solve this thanks to WordPress’s amazing plugin choices.
WP Rocket or another similar plugin should be downloaded and installed.
If you’re using WP Rocket, go to the Static Files tab and choose the file types you’d like to minify (CSS, JS, and HTML).
FAQs
Why is my website slow?
You ran a site speed test and discovered that your load time is very slow.
There may be a variety of reasons for your site’s slow loading time.
It could be anything from the time it takes for your server to load to the size of your images to the number of redirects you have.
That implies that there is a slew of things you can do to boost page speed.
This article discusses some of the things you can do to increase the speed of your website.
However, you must have a goal in mind before you begin troubleshooting to improve website performance.
Let’s take a closer look at what constitutes a decent load time so you know what to aim for.
What is a good page load time?
It’s a nice thing to establish a target for where you would like your site’s speed to be before you begin to work on it.
If you don’t know what an appropriate page speed is, this can be tricky.
The best practice, according to Google, is 3 seconds
Sadly, most sites aren’t even close, according to the results of its recent benchmark report.
In a study of 900,000 mobile ad landing pages from 126 countries, Google discovered that 70percent of the pages took roughly seven seconds to display the visual content above the fold.
None of the sectors they studied came close to their suggested best practice of three seconds on average.
The average length of time for a mobile landing page to completely load is 22 seconds, but if a mobile site requires longer than three seconds to load, 53 percent of visitors will leave it.
Furthermore, as the time it takes for a page to load increases from one to ten seconds, the likelihood of a mobile user bouncing increases by 123 percent.
This indicates that site owners in total have a ton of work ahead of them in order to get their sites up to Google’s standards.
On the plus side, that means that if you put in the effort to get your site’s speed up to par, you’ll be well ahead of the competition in terms of user experience.
You could use Google’s suggestions and benchmarks to set goals and track your progress as you enhance your site.
After all, as the world’s most popular search engine, Google does have a significant influence on your success.
As a result, adopting their standards as your own is never a bad idea.
What is page speed?
Page speed is frequently mistaken for web speed, which is the page speed for a random sample of a site’s page views.
Page speed, on the other hand, can be measured in terms of page load time, which is the time taken for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server, or time to first byte (TTFB), which is the time taken for your browser to collect the first byte of data from the webserver.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights will help you assess your page speed.
PageSpeed Insights Speed Score uses CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) data to report on two key speed metrics: First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOMContentLoaded (DCL).
How do I check my page speed?
To be able to check the page speed of your website, simply use Google’s PageSpeed insights or try Pingdom Website Speed Test.
Alternatively, you can use GTmetrix to check the speed of you website.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve learned both what Google set as the suggested loading time for an average site as well as how to speed up your website…
It is best for you to start implementing one of the pieces of advice from this post.
This is due to the fact that we all prefer to visit sites that load quickly.
We hope you have found this article to be helpful and informative.