If you’ve developed an attractive and high-functioning website packed with brilliant content, it will fail if it’s not fast.
You probably developed and designed your website via a low-latency, high-bandwidth Wi-Fi and fixed-line connection. However, your user may be accessing it via a mobile phone with a tiny battery and 2G or 3G radio communication. And they’ll still expect your website to load in a flash.
We want quick, mobile-friendly content at our fingertips. Our attention span has fallen with our raised expectations. We’re very demanding, and if we don’t get what we want, we’re very impatient.
Various studies have shown that if a web page is slow to load up, users are not only quick to give up and go elsewhere, they’re also putting off visiting the site again in the future, and likely to pass on their bad experience. To add insult to injury, site speed is also a ranking factor in Google’s search engine, so being slow could affect where you land in a web search.
The difference between your website’s success and failure, between a high and low conversion rate and a good and bad reputation is just a matter of seconds. Speed really matters.
Starting out
If you’re not aware of how fast your website runs, you should be. With numerous online speed testing tools available free of charge (such as Pingdom, Web Page Test, or Google’s new Page Speed Online), it’s easy to get an overview of your website’s performance along with some good pointers to getting it faster. We like the Google Analytics plugin, which helps you keep track of all kinds of performance metrics (including speed) on an ongoing basis.
We’ll take you through 9 ways to optimize your website speed to make it lean, mean, and ready to go!
1. Use A Decent Web Host
Whatever you do, resist the temptation to use dirt-cheap web hosts for your WordPress website. Alongside a host of irritating, time-consuming features, bargain-basement often have cheaper setups and heavily-loaded servers which reduce server performance and increase resource restriction DNS response times and your Web page load time.
Decent, reliable web hosts give you plenty of bandwidth, a decent share of the CPU, reasonable disk input/output, plus lightning-fast DNS lookup, and HTTP response times. When you’re choosing, refer to an online guide (such as this one) to make you aware of any pitfalls, including the seemingly attractive offer of “unlimited storage” and “unlimited data transfer.” If someone sells you a pipe that can take unlimited water, it’ll still take you an age to fill a bath if the pipe is a millimeter thick and the water pressure is low.
You might benefit from going for a managed WordPress host (like WP Engine), which will take care of most of the performance side of your website (for example, all of the caching) so you don’t have to think about it.
2. Cache it if you can
If your website can cache and display only the latest version of your web pages to users, it saves the browser having to dynamically generate the page each time. This, in turn, saves a lot off web page load times.
A lot of caching plugins (like WP Super Cache or W3TC) also do a lot of other useful things, such as:
‘Super Caching’, where the PHP is bypassed and all the files are served in static HTML, which frees up server resources and makes your website faster
GZIP compression and deflation. Like ZIP file compression but for Web page files, these are efficient ways of transmitting content from the server to the browser, saving bandwidth, and speeding up page-loading time.
Minimizing the number of HTTP requests made to your website’s servers by combining JS scripts, HTML, and CSS files. Minifying will increase your efficiency, especially if your website has a lot of plugins.
3. Slim Down your Frame
A bulky framework crammed with flashy plugins leads to a heavy, bloated website that takes an age to load. Build your website around a high-quality, lightweight theme, such as those by Headway Themes, StudioPress (Genesis) and iThemes, and you’ll have a sound attractive framework that won’t slow you down. When you’re choosing, it might be worth testing the speed of its demo page using an online speed tool.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
If you haven’t already set up a CDN, you’ll find that it’s one of the best ways to improve page-loading speed. CDN works by hosting all of your static files across a massive global network of servers, so that users download your files from the server that’s the closest to them. Accessing a cache rather than requesting site data from servers is much faster and more efficient. The most popular CDN is CloudFlare (https://cloudflare.com), which also has a solid free tier.
5. Wrangle your CSS and JavaScript
Get your CSS to load in external files, so the browser only has to load the files once, rather than every time anyone visits the Web page. Then, if you can, put this external CSS as close to the top of your site as possible, and put your external JavaScript files near to the bottom tag. This stops your browser from having to trawl through all the external file requests right from the start. If many of your files are controlled by plugins with limited customisation, this might be tricky; if it’s not possible, focus on the other tips.
6. Keep things Simple
Plugins are an excellent way to lend your WordPress site functionality, but it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Limit your plugins as much as possible, ensuring that everything provides a vital function and that nothing is too resource-hungry (use a speed diagnosis website to find out the culprits- social-sharing plugins are renowned!).
7. Compress your Images
Just because HTML reduces the size of an image, it doesn’t mean that image is taking up less server space. When you’re using a graphics program like Photoshop, always select the ‘save for web’ option.
There are a couple of great plugins for compressing your images:
Smush.it from Yahoo reduces the image file size (thus improving the loading time) without affecting the resolution. Even better, WP-SmushIt compresses all of your images automatically as you load them- and it’s retroactive.
Lazy Load makes your videos and images only available on demand, visible to the user as he/she scrolls down the screen. This reduces the weight of the unloaded images off your browser on page load, thus speeding things up and saving on bandwidth.
8. Minimise cruft your WordPress database
Because WordPress autosaves everything and caches many other things, your database will quickly become cluttered with spam, post revisions, drafts, pingbacks, trackbacks, deleted items, etc. A plugin like WP-Optimize routinely clears out the database, ensuring that it only contains what it needs to keep.
9. Lose pingbacks and trackbacks
WordPress uses pingbacks and trackbacks to interact with other blogs, alerting them of links in your posts. By turning them off (by going to the “Discussion” tab in “Settings”), backlinks to your website won’t be lost, but they’ll no longer be a drain on your page speed.
We hope these few tips are helpful at getting your WordPress site into prime shape. Time waits for no man and no man waits for a Web page that takes an age to load, so make sure you do everything you can to make your Website a front-runner.
View published article in TorqueMag
