We live in an impatient society. We want instant response to our requests and get frustrated when we have to wait for anything, especially for websites to load. If your website doesn’t meet visitors’ expectations for speed, they’re quick to hit the back button, telling Google your site doesn’t have the quality user experience it demands. That behavior over time can hurt your search engine ranking. But if you optimize your website speed, you can prevent those exits and increase customer satisfaction and confidence.
Why is Website Speed Important?
There are two main reasons to care about improving your website performance across all devices.
User Experience
How long do you typically wait for a page to load? And if it doesn’t load within your patience criteria, do you click the back button? Of course you do.
The faster the page load time, the better the user experience. A better user experience translates into higher conversions and more revenue.
People want and need a fast online user experience. Page load time affects your ability to engage and convert visitors into leads. Here are some specifics:
- 53% of visitors leave if your page takes over 3 seconds to load. (Google)
- Sites that load in 1 second have conversion rates of 39% (Portent)
- 82% of consumers say slow page speeds impact their purchasing decisions. (Unbounce)
In other words, a bad user experience negatively affects your sales.
Organic Rankings
Google has considered website speed a ranking factor since 2010 for desktop and 2018 for mobile devices. They include page speed as a ranking signal because slow sites negatively affect user experience.
Core Web Vitals (CWV) was introduced in May 2020. It measures and evaluates the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of websites. All three of these contribute to how a user perceives the experience of your webpage. Google uses CWV as part of its page experience ranking signals, so optimizing your website to perform well can help your visibility.
Therefore, you need to optimize website speed across all devices. Pages with long load times cause visitors to quickly hit the back button, sending a signal to Google that the page is not worthy of ranking. In short, a well-optimized and fast-loading page will help deliver better rankings and give your site an advantage over your slower-loading competitors.
How to Test Your Website Speed
Assessing page load speed may sound hard, but many tools can help.
Google provides a tool called PageSpeed Insights that measures website page speed and provides you detailed information on how you can improve your load time. PageSpeed Insights gives you a report on how well your site performs and suggestions for improvement. There are separate reports for mobile and desktop.
GTmetrix also provides a page speed report. Once you run the report, you can download a PDF file of the details. GTmetrix also provides a WordPress optimization guide to help you with your performance optimizations.
These tools evaluate your web page based on a set of rules and give you recommendations that you can use to improve the page load speed of your website.
How to Optimize Your WordPress Website Speed
WordPress is a wonderful content management system that gives us many options and puts us in control of our online presence. But all this control and flexibility can affect how well our websites perform for our businesses. You put a lot of work into your inbound marketing efforts by creating quality content that attracts the right visitor. But if your visitors come and leave frustrated, you’ve lost an opportunity.
So what can you do to optimize your website performance?
Create a Lightweight Foundation
- Choose your WordPress theme wisely. Some of the more popular premium themes add a lot of overhead by including features that you don’t need for your website. Pick a theme framework like GeneratePress that is lightweight, highly customizable, responsive, and powerful, reducing the need for custom development.
- Get rid of your page builder. There is nothing wrong with page builders, but they can add overhead as well. Since switching from a page builder to the WordPress block editor using GenerateBlocks for page layout and design, all of the sites we build pass the page speed tests. GenerateBlocks provides additional features to the WordPress block editor. Ultimate Blocks, Spectra, and Kadence are also plugins that extend the editing capabilities of the block editor.
- Minimize your plugin usage. Many useful features can be implemented using a plugin. However, ensure the plugins you use are not only needed and add value to your website but are also created by reputable developers. Too many plugins will affect the performance of your site. The more you install and activate, the more likely your website will load slower.
Size and Compress Your Images Correctly
Many users don’t realize that images from your smartphone are high-resolution files, maybe 2 megabytes or more. If used in its original format, loading that file or even its thumbnail can slow down your page speed.
To create a quality image, size it at 72 PPI (pixels per inch) and make it about 9 x 12 inches. Find a photo editor that works for you. There are free online editors, such as Canva. Plus, there are some options you can install on your PC or Mac.
Photo editing tools allow you to save for the web and reduce the size of the image. Saving your images at 30% quality or less does not affect their clarity in a browser.
Even reducing the size of your images manually may still not be enough. There are many plugins that optimize images as you upload them. WP-Optimize will compress your images, and it will also create a WebP version.
Further reading
Image Optimization for SEO: Best Practices That Work
Use Caching and Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML
WordPress dynamically creates pages by pulling content from the database and applying the theme template as users request them. A caching plugin saves pages when they are retrieved so that future requests for the same page can be delivered faster.
Minify is the process of removing unnecessary characters in your website’s CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. These characters include whitespaces, line breaks, comments, and block delimiters, which are useful for humans but unnecessary for machines. When you minify the files of a website containing CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code, your web browser can read them faster.
There are several quality caching plugins available that also provide minification. Some hosting companies are now installing their own optimization plugins on their hosting accounts. The following plugins all provide caching, minification, and image compression:
- WP-Optimize
- Litespeed Cache (works well on Hosting.com)
- SiteGround Optimizer (for sites hosted on Siteground)
Reduce Your Database Size
The WordPress database can grow very quickly, resulting in your website loading slowly.
When you are writing or editing a page or post, WordPress has an auto-save feature that frequently saves revisions. This is a great feature that enables you to recover a previous version. Just remember that each revision increases the size of your database, which can slow down your website.
Spam comments, trashed posts and pages, and plugins that didn’t clean up their database tables when deleted or unused images can also increase the size of your database. WP-Optimize is an effective tool that automatically cleans your WordPress database, reduces its size, and helps your valuable content load more quickly.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) Service
A CDN delivers your site content to different networks, allowing users to download it from the closest server. This can increase load speed. There are several high-performance CDN services, and if you are running an eCommerce site, they are worth the fees. In addition, if you have a lot of traffic to your site, you may want to try CloudFlare, a free CDN that speeds up sites and provides protection against many security threats.
Transfer to a New Hosting Environment
Your hosting company is a major player when it comes to optimizing website speed.
Most of our websites run just fine in a shared hosting environment. Siteground and Hosting.com are quality hosting providers that are affordable. But if you implement all the above and you still have a slow website, you may want to consider the following:
- Virtual Private Server. You still share the CPU with other virtual machines but have guaranteed dedicated access to the resources you purchase from the hosting company (memory, disk storage, transfer rate, etc.)
- Dedicated Server. You have full control of the physical server and complete access to all its resources.
- Managed WordPress Hosting. Because of the popularity of WordPress, some hosting companies specialize in creating an optimized WordPress environment with specialized support for WordPress, themes, and plugins. These managed WordPress hosting providers are something to consider if you don’t have time to keep your site updated and backed up.
Make Website Speed Work for Your Business
Website speed isn’t just a technical detail but a visibility and conversion issue as well. A fast-loading site keeps visitors engaged, helps you rank better in search results, and makes it easier for the right people to find and choose your business.
WordPress puts control into the hands of marketers and small business owners. But with that power, you need to make smart decisions when it comes to “feature rich” versus “website speed.” You need to balance the two for a quality user experience that brings in more traffic, more leads, and better results overall.
