Due to Google now penalising slow-loading websites, web services providers are increasingly focused on improving the load time of existing and new WordPress websites. More importantly, if you have a website that takes 4 to 5 seconds for a page to load, a lot of your visitors will just leave which will cost you sales.
One of the first tasks recommended by internet marketing services providers is to check how fast your web pages take to load.
The front page of your website is typically the page that has the biggest page size, as in a majority of instances it that has the highest concentration of images and content on any one page so will take the longest to load.
1. Choosing the Right Web Host Provider
Like most other investments, you get what you pay for and if you have a really cheap web hosting package, then this could be one of the reasons why your web pages load slowly.
In this situation, your only option would be to test a new hosting provider or move to a better package with your existing web host.
2. Selecting an Appropriate WordPress Theme
Internet marketing service providers often claim that the wrong choice of WordPress Theme can significantly impact load time.
Themes that have plenty of customising options such as those which provide the ability to change colours on several parts of the website and ones with several little widgets integrated are heavy to upload on someone’s device screen. It’s best to avoid such themes.
Select a theme that’s simple and has just the features that you need, typically one with fewer coding lines and fewer options for you to configure the design of your website, but will upload your web pages much faster, both on the desktop and mobile devices.
3. Minimising the Plugins
The number of plugins you have installed in your WordPress website can significantly impact page load speeds. Typically the more plugins you have installed, the slower your website will get, but it also depends on the type of plugins that you are using.
Some plugins will slow down your website more compared to others. What internet marketing services provider recommend is only to use plugins that you really need. If you have plugins aren’t adding functionality to your website, remove them because they are slowing down your website.
4. Removing Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Removing pingbacks and trackbacks from your website is also a good way to reduce some uploading time of your website.
Pingbacks and trackbacks basically alert other blogs that you have linked to them. To remove this, go to the settings section of your WordPress dashboard to see if you have link notifications from other blogs, feedback and tracks on new articles.
Adjust and check this option and then save changes. Ensure that you always update your website to the newest version of WordPress because the newest version commonly comes with improvements that will boost the general performance of your website.
5. Optimise Image Dimensions
Optimising images can drastically increase the speed of your website. This is one aspect which many business owners simply don’t pay much attention.
High-resolution images have huge file sizes and the website takes a long time to upload. To optimise images there are two things that you can do. The first one is if you are using Photoshop or another image editor is to optimise your images inside that software.
Find a good balance between the quality of your image and the file size. Sometimes you may need to reduce the quality of your image just a bit, so it’s not too noticeable.
The other thing that you can do is install a plug-in such as WP Smush. This is a plugin that will optimise all of the images that you have inside of your website. Once you have used this plug-in to optimise your images and don’t need it anymore, simply remove it. You can always install the plug-in in the future if you need to optimise many images.
You can also decrease the number of blog posts appearing on your home page. Say that you have ten posts in your home page’s blog section and each post has a thumbnail image. The more posts you have, the more time it will take to upload your front page.
In your WordPress dashboard, go to settings and click on “reading”. Below blog pages, adjust settings to show at most seven posts or less. Now, fewer posts will appear on the front page of your website.
6. Turn PHP Files into HTML Files
Turning PHP files into HTML files will make your WordPress website load much faster. For this, you need to use a plugin called WP super cache. Once you have installed the plugin, in the Advanced Settings tab, check the box for compressing pages so they serve more quickly to visitors and the one for non-users. Also, check the cache rebuild box.
In the CDN section, click on the checkbox, Enable CDN Support.
The reason why you need to do this is that a lot of files on your website are stored on a server in a couple of countries at the same time, so if somebody from the U.S. America accesses your website they don’t need to go to the server in Europe because when you enable this your files will also be stored in America, India, Europe, Australia and everywhere.
There will be a backup of your website in different places, which improves load speed.
Next, go to the preload tab, check the first two boxes and update settings.
By taking these simple steps recommended by web marketing services providers, your website will load faster and your search rankings will improve considerably. Although the tasks require some investment of your time, the long-term benefits are well worth the effort.
About Nik
Results oriented Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Online Marketing Strategist with over 10 years of professional experience. He worked alongside a team of SEO Experts in Sydney and helped numerous businesses across Australia in terms of leveraging their SEO / Internet Marketing campaigns and guiding them to success using effective and white hat methodologies.
