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WordPress is the best content management system in the world. 28% of websites on the internet is powered by WordPress. The great thing about building your website with WordPress is you get an easily customizable website while spending less. WordPress is also secure and has amazing functionality, thanks to the thousands of plugins available for you to choose from.
When you have a WordPress website, it is important that your website performs optimally. It is good for the SEO of the website. One of the many ways to make sure your website is in tiptop shape is the speed of your website. Your website load speed determines how light or heavy your website is. A slow website doesn't attract visitors and performs terribly on Google search engine rankings.
Do you know a 1-second delay in your website load time reduces your page view by 11%, decreases customer satisfaction by 16%, and eats away 7% of your website's conversion rate? That's damaging to your website!
If you want to make sure your website is performing well, you have to improve your website speed. In this article, we will show you how to improve your WordPress website speed; this makes your WordPress website faster and increases your website speed on both mobile and desktop. We will also show you how you can improve your WordPress website performance, and WordPress plugins you can use to improve your website speed and performance.
How To Improve the Speed of Your WordPress Website
Having a fast website is a great feeling. Do you know how happy an internet user is when they find information on what they are looking for and the website with the information loads in less than 2 seconds? It feels great, and they will want to come back again to your website.
If you have a slow website, you're missing out on a whole lot of traffic and revenue for your business. In this chapter of the article, you will learn how to make your WordPress website faster.
This is what you need to do to make your website faster.
- Analyze your website: If you have a WordPress website that loads slowly, it is important you find out the reason why your website isn't performing the way you want. There are several tools to help you analyze your website speed.
These tools even give you suggestions on how to improve your website speed. Some of these tools include Google page speed insights, GTMetrix, Pingdom. You can also compare your site speed on mobile versus desktop here ThinkWithGoogle.
- Use a good hosting platform: This is very important. When you want to build your website, good hosting is important. Using shared hosting is great but might be costly to your site speed especially if there is a huge influx of traffic to your site.
That's why it's important to use a managed WordPress hosting for your website. It might be more expensive but it's worth it.
- Use Plugins: Plugins are like heaven-sent tools for your WordPress website. With a plugin you can make your website do anything, speeding it up too.
There are several WordPress plugins for improving your website speed. Do a quick Google search to find out the one that fits into your objective.
- Clear cache: If your website becomes too slow, you'll be advised to clear your cache, it makes your website load faster. For your WordPress website, you can clear your cache using plugins like W3TotalCache. It makes your website perform better and load faster.
- Optimize images: If your site contains a lot of images it will load slower than it's supposed to. Optimizing your image is important if you want a faster loading website.
You can optimize your images by working on them before uploading or use a WordPress plugin to help you optimize your images. One of the best plugins for optimizing images on WordPress is WPSmush. There are other powerful image compressor plugins for your WordPress website, just choose the one that works best with your site.
There is a thin line between a successful and a failed WordPress website - Speed!
