A website’s performance determines its rankings in search engines. The time it takes to load pages is a significant factor that influences how successful the website will be.
In most cases, if it takes long to load, visitors will turn away, perhaps even clicking the back button before it finishes loading. This means low traffic to your website.
If you are wondering how to grow your business online in 2020, start by improving your website. Here are a few tips on how to optimize your WordPress website.
Optimize Your Images
Images help reduce long pieces of text and make your articles get more views. However, they also take up a lot of storage space. Having many images on a page can, therefore, increase the time it takes to load. Optimizing images for the internet before uploading them to your website is a great way to boost speeds.
The use of catchy images boosts the website’s online presence and plays a big part in attracting new clients. A fast loading site with quality images makes a good impression and creates more to remember for your visitors.
Choose the Right Hosting Plan
This is a crucial step that has a huge influence on the success of your website. If your server is slow to process commands, the site is unlikely to get any significant views. In cases of shared hosting, if the neighboring sites get a lot of traffic, it can affect the server performance and slow your website.
A managed WordPress hosting service, on the other hand, gives highly optimized server configurations. It also offers automatic backups, updates, and advanced security configurations.
Choose Your Advertisements Wisely
Since advertisements are important for most websites to survive, there is a need to find the right balance between income and speed. When the website design is optimized, a few advertisements will not affect its speed. It is essential to be careful about the type of advertisements you decide to add to your website.
Use an image that is optimized for the web as a link to the site you are advertising. Link texts are also useful. Advertisements from third party networks can slow down the site when calling external servers.
You need to test the speed of your website before and after adding an ad to determine its impact.
Install WordPress Caching Plugins
To build your website pages, WordPress has to find the required information and display it to the searcher. This process involves many steps and can slow your website when there are multiple visitors at once.
Caching makes the site faster by creating a copy of the page after its first load and serving the cached version to the subsequent users. This is faster than going through the whole page generation process every time.
However, poorly coded WordPress plugins will often load too much bloat, thus slowing down your site. To choose the best plugins, pay attention to the ease of use and performance. Always run speed tests before and after the installation of a plugin.
Bottom Line
Because search engines put so much importance on the speed of web pages, your website must have fast loading pages to be successful. Many people assume that only experts can optimize WordPress websites, which is far from the truth. All you need to optimize your website is to follow good practice and try out these 4 techniques above.
Don’t forget to test the speed of your website before and after trying out these practices. These changes will boost the performance of your WordPress website significantly.
