Are you struggling to improve your WordPress website performance?
Let’s discuss the importance of a fast-loading WordPress website and the 7 quick tips to speed up your WordPress website for enhancing your user experience as well as SEO rankings. Here we will mention some optimization plugins that you can implement if you are not from any technical background.
Content Outline
- Importance of first loading website
- How a fast-loading website improves your page speed insights scores
- 5 quick tips to speed up your WordPress website
- How to measure the improvement of your website page speed performance
- Conclusion
Importance of fast loading website
A website’s pagespeed is one of the crucial things your users notice when they interact with your website. Let’s see the importance of a fast-loading website in detail.
- A fast-loading website enhances your user experience:
When users visit your website, they expect it to load quickly. If your website takes a lot of time to load, it affects your user experience. So, automatically the average on-page time will decrease for your website.
- A fast-loading website boosts your SEO rankings:
Pagespeed is one of the important factors which Google considers for its ranking algorithm. Having a fast-loading website can boost your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings.
- A fast-loading website improves conversion rates:
Conversion rates indicate the number of users who complete a desired action such as filling out a form, booking a demo, purchasing from e-commerce stores, and so on. Your fast-loading website can improve your conversion ratio as well.
How a fast-loading website improves your page speed insights scores
Google Pagespeed Insights generates a score based on the performance of core web vital metrics on a scale of 0 to 100. Core web vitals measure the user experience for visual stability, loading performance, and interactivity.
Let’s see the three pillars of core web vital metrics:
- The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time to take for rendering the largest content above the fold.
- Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS) measure the time for shifting elements of your webpage while the page is loading and rendering.
- First Input Delay (FID) measures the time to your webpage’s load responsiveness. This FID is replaced with a stable core web vitals Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which measures your user interface responsiveness.
Your fast-loading website leads to a better core web vitals performance, leading to a good Google Pagespeed Insights score.
5 quick tips to speed up your WordPress website
At this point, you understand the importance of a fast-loading WordPress website. So, if you are struggling with your slow-loading WordPress website, you need to implement the following strategies to speed up your WordPress website.
- Minification of HTML, CSS, and stylesheets can speed up your website:
HTML files, CSS stylesheets, and JavaScript files are the fundamental elements of a webpage. By HTML code, a developer can create the website’s content, where CSS stylesheets are used to make the webpages stylish, and finally, Javascript is used to make the webpage more interactive.
However, developers use many unnecessary spaces and comments in their coding files. This increases the file size. So, your website’s loading time will automatically increase.
This issue can be solved by minifying these large-sized files. Minification is the process where all unnecessary spaces and comments are removed. For this, several online tools are available such as HTML minifier, CSS minifier, JavaScript minifier, and many more.
Also, make sure to use only verified plugins with good reviews. In many cases, this means that these plugins work fast enough and do not slow down your WordPress. For example, Cost Calculator shows stable results in terms of speed and performance, integrates well into the website, and plus generally helps improve conversion rates.
- Optimization of all images can improve the loading time of your website:
Images are considered the most powerful way of communication because it’s convey any messages very easily. But unoptimized images are the most common reason for your slow-loading website.
To speed up your slow-loading website, you need to optimize your large-sized images. Converting your large-size JPG or PNG images into the modern WebP or AVIF format can optimize the images without losing their quality.
For this image optimization, you can use online image optimization tools like RabbitLoader, imagify, and so on.
- Adding lazy loading to speed up your WordPress website:
Lazy loading can reduce your webpage loading time by allowing your website to load the images that are above the fold. Lazy loading is the best option if your WordPress website has a lot of images.Several online lazy-loading plugins are available such as a3 Lazy Load, RabbitLoader, Lazyloader, and many more, that you can use to speed up your wordPress website.
- Using a browser cache can improve your website’s pagespeed:
A browser cache can improve the pagespeed performance by temporarily storing static resources such as HTML, CSS, scripts, and media files when a user visits your website for the first time.
For your WordPress optimization, you can use W3 total cache, RabbitLoader, Litespeed cache, and so on.
- Using a Content Delivery Network can improve the page speed performance:
A Content Delivery Network is used to reduce the distance between your user and the origin server by distributing the content across the proxy server worldwide. Thus, it will reduce the latency.
For your WordPress website, you can use Cloudflare, CDN77, and so on.
How to measure the improvement of your website pagespeed performance
After applying these above strategies, you need to check the improvement of your WordPress website’s pagespeed performance. To better understand the improvement, first, you need to check the pagespeed score before applying the above strategies.
You can use Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrics, and Pingdom to check the pagespeed performance. If the pagespeed score is greater than 90, then it is a good score, a score between 50-90 is considered an average and the below 50 scores are considered a bad score.
After implementing the above strategies, you need to check the pagespeed score again to understand the performance improvement.
Conclusion
Here, you have seen the importance of a fast-loading WordPress website and learned the quick tips to speed up your slow-loading website to enhance the user experience and boost the SEO rankings.
The response time of your website is quite an important thing. In most cases, it’s a key factor to retain the visitor on your website and provide the overall experience and smooth interaction with your website. So wasting time to grow onpage parameters definitely worth it.