Do you want to make your WordPress site run faster? Quick-loading pages boost the user experience, improve page views, and aid WordPress SEO.
Website page load speed is a significant factor, impacting everything from SEO and Google rankings to overall user experience and traffic; it should be a top priority for every responsible website owner.
This article will explain why website speed is necessary and some ways to boost website speed.
Why Is Website Speed Necessary?
Nowadays, each business wants to provide a positive user experience to its website users. Users are becoming increasingly impatient as technology advances; many of them are unwilling to wait even two seconds for a site to load.
Users will leave your site if it is too sluggish, and they will go to your rivals if they are not satisfied with your page speed. With today’s rapidly changing buyer behavior, it’s impossible to ignore the significance of the website’s performance.
Some Ways to Boost Website Speed
Here are several ways to boost website speed, which includes:
1. Test website performance
Website speed tests determine how well a site works. Testing a site daily can aid developers in monitoring performance degradations or enhancements. A speed test must also assist developers in recognizing some or all of the areas that are slowing down site performance and where improvements can be made.
There are multiple high-quality website speed tests available; most are free. WebPageTest.org (a Cloudflare partner) offers several free tests and generates extensive breakdowns of how rapidly various components of a page load. Developers can also use WebPageTest.org to check sites for multiple devices and network connection speeds.
Google also offers a tool known as PageSpeed Insights, which allows you to test your website’s speed in depth. The Network tab in Google Chrome DevTools can also assist developers in evaluating their site’s performance; it displays all HTTP requests, the size of requested assets, and the time it takes for requests to be completed.
2. Use a CDN
By caching content in several locations worldwide, CDNs help websites load faster. The cache servers of a CDN are usually closer to end-users than the host or origin server. Requests for content are sent through a CDN server rather than directly to the hosting server that could be thousands of miles away and connected to many autonomous networks. The use of a CDN can drastically reduce website page load times.
3. Optimize images
Images include a large portion of Web traffic, and because image files are more extensive than HTML and CSS files, they usually take a long time to load on a site. Fortunately, image load time can be decreased through image optimization. Usually, optimizing images includes reducing the resolution, compressing files, and minimizing their dimensions, and many image optimizers and image compressors are available for free on the web.
4. Minify CSS and JavaScript files
Minifying code means deleting something that a computer doesn’t have to know and execute, such as code comments, whitespace, and semicolons that aren’t required. It minimizes the size of CSS and JavaScript files, allowing them to load quicker in the browser and consume less bandwidth. Minification will lead to minor speed improvements on its own.
5. Minimize the number of HTTP requests if possible
In most cases, many web pages will need browsers to perform many HTTP requests for different assets on the page, such as images, scripts, and CSS files. In reality, most web pages will need dozens of such requests. Each request leads to a round trip to and from the resource’s hosting server, increasing a web page’s overall load time. Furthermore, along with resources loaded from multiple different providers, an issue with one of the hosts might affect the web page’s ability to load rapidly, or at all.
Due to such potential risks, the total number of assets that every page requires to load must be maintained to a minimum. Besides, a speed test must also assist you in figuring out which HTTP requests are taking the longest. For instance, if images are slowing down a page, developers can search for a quicker image hosting solution (such as a CDN).
6. Use browser HTTP caching
The browser cache is a temporary storage area in which browsers store static file copies to load recently visited webpages much faster, rather than needing to request the same content multiple times. Developers can tell browsers to cache a web page’s components, which won’t change frequently. The headers of HTTP responses from the hosting server provide instructions for browser caching. This drastically minimizes the amount of data that the server must transmit to the browser, resulting in faster load times for visitors who visit particular pages regularly.
7. Don’t use redirects, if possible
When visitors to one page are redirected to another, it is a redirect. Redirects increase the time it takes for a page to load by a fraction of a second or even a whole second. Each second matters when it comes to developing a high-performance website. Although redirects are often inevitable, they must not be used if not required.
8. Install a WordPress Caching Plugin
WordPress pages are “dynamic.” It means that they are designed in real-time when anyone views a post or page on your site.
WordPress must perform a process to locate the essential information, place it all together, and then show it to your user to build your pages.
This process has a lot of stages, and it can cause your site to load slowly when you have several people browsing it at the same time.
That’s why we suggest using a cache plugin on each WordPress website. Caching can speed up your WordPress site by 2x to 5x times.
Some Key Takeaways
Understanding how to speed up a website is a must-have ability. Users and search engines value website performance; therefore, it’s crucial to your website’s performance. In this article, we have explained several ways to boost website speed which will help to reduce page load time.
If you are looking for HTML to WordPress professionals, Helpbot is your ideal place. We are a team of WP experts efficient WordPress developers who offer the best WordPress Speed Optimization 24×7 services to our clients.
