Your website’s speed can affect user satisfaction, SEO performance, and the environment.
A fast-loading website can:
- Improve conversions: Users expect near-instant page loads, a slow-loading website can drive them away
- Improve user engagement: A fast website can improve the user experience and increase the likelihood that users will stay on the site
- Improve SEO performance: A fast website can improve Search Engine performance
- Environment: Faster loading times save energy.
Here are some tips to improve your website’s speed:
- Minimize redirects
- Avoid unnecessary plug-ins and themes
- Choose the right web host
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Leverage caching
- Improve your website’s structure and code
- Reformat and Compress images.
Google’s PageSpeed insights can be used to test your website speed:
https://pagespeed.web.dev
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is a geographically distributed group of servers that caches content close to the end user’s location. CDN is not necessary if your customer base is not global. CDN caching stores copies of files in a cache so that cached content can be accessed quickly. It allows images, HTML and javascript files, and videos to be quickly transferred and loaded onto your website.
The WordPress plugin Jetpack features an image and file CDN with the free version of the plugin. https://jetpack.com/features/design/content-delivery-network/
Server Caching
Not to be confused with Browser caching, website server caching is the process of storing a temporary HTML version of your page on the server so it can be accessed more quickly when a user visits the page. Load cached pages ensure web pages load at a faster speed.
Reformat and Compress images
Compressing image size can greatly speed up load times. This is often a balancing act between image size and quality – the smaller the size, the lower the image quality.
Recommended by Google, converting your images WebP format can achieve up to 34% smaller file sizes compared to JPEG and up to 26% compared to PNG.
WordPress creates multiple sizes for every uploaded image causing the uploads folder to become bloated. Unused image sizes and unused images should be deleted to save disk space.
Webpages load much faster by loading web parts gradually, a process called Lazy Load. It only loads the images when they are visible on the screen.
WP Optimize is a great plugin that handles caching, images compression, database clean up and more.
