Site speed, along with user experience on websites, has always been a critical aspect of success in SEO’s ever-competitive realm. However, with the widespread adoption of the internet and the use of mobile devices eclipsing desktop use in most consumer-facing businesses, people also increasingly expect sites to load almost immediately.
Users today will almost instantly click the back button and go on to the next result if a page takes more than a few seconds to load. As a result, Google began paying attention to site speed and recognized its relevance as a ranking criterion.
WordPress users must understand what they can do to increase their site speed to keep pace with Google’s site-ranking standards. That is something that this article will assist you with.
Why Speed is Important for Your WordPress Site
To set things straight, page speed has an impact on SEO. In fact, page speed is a direct ranking component, as Google’s Algorithm Speed Update has made clear. Additionally, speed can also indirectly impact rankings by increasing bounce rates and decreasing dwell time.
According to studies, the average human attention span has decreased from 12 seconds to 8 seconds between 2000 and 2016. With this information, you can infer that you have a limited amount of time to show consumers your content and persuade them to dwell on your website.
Users may abandon your website before it even begins to load if it is too slow. In fact, according to one case study involving Amazon, Google, and other prominent sites, a 1-second delay in page load time is one second too late as it can result in a 7% drop in conversions, an 11% drop in page views, and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction.
Furthermore, Google and other search engines have begun penalizing slower websites by ranking them lower in search results, resulting in significantly decreased traffic for such sites.
How to Improve WordPress Site Speed
If you want your WordPress website to generate more traffic, subscribers, and income, you simply have to make it fast. Here are six simple tips to do just that.
Make Use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Essentially, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of servers that distribute web pages and other content based on the user’s location, the origin of the webpage, and the server that hosts it.
Offload Media and Email When Necessary
In some manner, anything that makes a request affects the performance of your site. Thus, it may be smart to entirely offload this for sites that host hundreds of thousands of files or substantial media.
Offloading is not the same as serving it over a CDN. The original data remains at your server using a CDN; the CDN simply has many copies of it. On the other hand, offloading media or files entails physically removing them from your hosting provider’s physical location.
Compress Your Images
Compressing your images is another efficient approach to reduce page load time and improve site speed. A CDN can help with this, but it cannot completely solve the problem. Thus, you may turn to various plugins available that will compress all of the images on your website, as well as new photos as they are uploaded.
Prevent Ad Scripts and Pop-ups from Slowing Down the User Experience
Many websites now include third-party software that either displays advertisements or employs pop-ups to encourage conversion. Of course, you want to grow your audience and increase your sales, but you must find a middle ground.
While it is tough to remove them to increase your website’s speed completely, you may reduce their performance impact while maintaining them on your site to give the benefits they were designed to provide. The key is to figure out which third-party scripts are running on your site, where they came from, and how they affect your website.
For this reason, you can use a variety of real-time monitoring tools to track and detect which scripts cause your site to take longer to load and have an impact on your metrics.
Install a Caching Plugin
Installing cache plugins on your WordPress site is another excellent approach to reduce site loading time. Caching plugins function by generating a static version of your WordPress website and providing it to your site’s users and visitors, effectively decreasing the time it takes for pages to load.
Remove Unused Plugins
Many WordPress plugins, especially those that you do not need, might make your site extremely slow. As a result, it is critical to check the plugins you have already installed and remove any that are not used and offer no useful value.
WordPress users add different plugins to their website when they first start them up to improve how they seem, only to find and soon learn that great-looking websites do not always translate and generate traffic, especially if the page-loading time is poor.
The symptoms of a WordPress plugin causing general slowness vary depending on the activity the plugin is conducting. A slow plugin, on the other hand, will frequently influence every page of a WordPress site.
With this information in mind, it is easy to reject the plugin as badly designed or ineffective. While this is true in some instances, it is not always the case. A plugin can take a long time to load due to misconfiguration, database slowness, or external resources that are slower to react.
So, if a plugin takes a long time to operate, it might be good to check numerous other screens for more information. Moreover, before concluding that deactivating the plugin is the best or only option, verify the transactions, databases, and external resources.
In addition, it is also a good idea to make sure your plugins are up to date. This option does not only help with the page loading speed, but it also offers your site more security.
Conclusion
As the SEO market steadily becomes more competitive by the hour, adjusting one’s sail to avoid sinking is a must, either by revamping a website, creating a professional email, or speeding up a website. With Bauertech, undertaking such ways to speed up and optimize your website will also take you towards a better competitive SEO stance.
