A Quick Guide to a Faster WordPress Website

Your choice of a content management system (CMS) will largely determine whether you will meet your online marketing objectives. While there are millions of websites being indexed daily, statistics from Google show that only a few are making any revenue. One major problem is poor choice of platform. WordPress (WP) has managed to remain the most popular CMS and for many good reasons.

Harnessing the Power of WordPress

A WP website is highly customizable using thousands of free themes. As your business grows, you will also find it easy to expand due to the scalability of the CMS you are using. With thousands of available plugins,it is easy to enhance functionality in all aspects including analytics, SEO, and security among others. There is also a vibrant community from whom you can get free advice on anything to do with your WordPress website.

Optimizing Your WP Website Speed

If you are already running a website on WordPress, it is important to enhance performance in speed in order to gain a competitive edge. Loading speed is a big factor in search engine optimization (SEO) and it determines how your website fares on search engine result pages (SERPs) for ranking keywords. A 2015 survey by Kissmetrics shows that loading speed affects the bottom-line in a big way.

In the survey, 47% of respondents say they expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less. 40% abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. A single second delay in getting a page response leads to a 7% decrease in conversion rate. In essence, a slow website experiences high bounce rates and low conversion, which ultimately lead to failure.

This is the main reason why you have to optimize your WP loading speeds. This is not just done to indulge search engines but to provide a good user experience, which will lead to more traffic and better conversion.

To optimize your site’s speed, you have to test and evaluate how it is performing. This can be done using your URL on Google PageSpeed Insights to find weak areas which can be worked on to boost loading speeds. If you have been struggling with high bounce rate and low conversion, use this guide to faster WordPress website:

1. Choose the right theme/framework – When filtering through the thousands of free themes, make sure you focus on simplicity and speed. Avoid cluttered themes with features you don’t need.
2. Limit WordPress plugins –While plugins area great WP feature to enhance performance, you should not use them excessively as their coding and scripts will eventually slow your site.
3. Optimize the database – Make revisions on your website minimum because all this information will be stored on the database.
4. Image optimization – While visual content is great to attract traffic and increase sharing, you should minimize the size of these files. There are tools to compress images without compromising on quality.
5. Lazy load plugins – This helps in a more systematic loading of images and media files, which reduce the load speeds.
6. Avoid hotlinking – It might sound like a great idea in linking but remember the other sites will be using resources from your web hosting, thus reducing your load speeds.

Other tricks include turning off trackbacks and pingbacks, minifying Javascript and CSS, having render-blocking resources over the fold to load first, avoiding WOFF (Web Open Font Format), browser caching, enabling compression, minimizing HTTP requests, and choosing a reliable web hosting service.

Sujain Thomas is Data IT professional and blogger