8 Tips To Speed Up Your Website Load Time On WordPress

Website load time is becoming a thing of the essence, and that is the more reason every webmaster should have that at the back of his mind. No visitor will like to waste his or her time on your web page if it is taking too much time to load. To cut it short, website speed is a necessity in today’s online world. For all WordPress users, in this post, you will get to see a few tips you can adopt to speed up the load time of your WordPress site.

Must read: 8 Important On-page SEO Mistakes To Avoid From 2017s

Apart from SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), site speed is an important component to drive sales to your online business. Research conducted by some group of webmasters in Aberdeen, Scotland, reported that just a mere one-second delay in site load time resulted in 11% fewer page views, 16% decrease in customer’s satisfaction, and 7% fewer conversion.

You can imagine how bad that was, no thanks to a slow loading webpage.

To add to that, Amazon discovered that every 100 milliseconds it takes its site to load resulted in a 1% decrease in revenue. Even the big retail giant has noticed too.

While both reports are a little bit old, it is safe to understand that internet users still find slow-loading sites irritating. No matter how confident you are, if your site does not load very fast, consumers and visitors will definitely find one that does.

Must read: 10 Must-have Skills To Become A Successful Online Marketer

Because of the growing demands that consumers place on today’s online business, you as a brand must do everything possible to speed up your website load time and increase conversions.

If you thought that achieving that will cost you much because you have to outsource the task, check out these 8 tips on how to create a faster loading website on WordPress that is likely to get a massive conversion.

8 Tips To Reduce Your Website Load Time On WordPress

1. Optimize your images

As you already know, everything is going mobile, and more than half of all Google searches are carried out on mobile devices. 50% of those users will abandon a site that does not load fast within 3 seconds.

While images also explain the message on every site and page, they can also slow down your website load time because they account for the largest portion of a page’s downloadable byte space. This makes image optimization very important.

The best way you can optimize your images is to ensure that proper sizing and format are employed on every image you upload on your WordPress site. Your goal is to retain the image quality while minimizing its size as much as possible.

Webmasters on WordPress can achieve this by simply using a WordPress Plugin such as Smush image compression and optimization.

2. Minimize HTTP request

Yahoo once gave a report that almost 80% of a website load time is spent on downloading the page’s component, CSS files, scripts, images, style sheets, and other features. Before all these can be acquired, an HTTP request must be made.

This actually means that the more any given webpage has, the longer it will take to load.

You can help to speed u your website’s load time by reducing the number of on-screen elements, and combining various stylesheets, JavaScript libraries, etc. This will help reduce the number of HTTP requests that are made.

3. Optimize your site by using compression

When a site is using lots of high-quality content, its file size will definitely be large, and this will slow the time it takes to download.

As a result of this, compressing web pages through zipping is good means of reducing website load time. Optimizing your site using compression is an easy way to save your bandwidth and speed up your website load time.

4. Mind the number of plugins you have

Plugins are popular tools for adding additional functionality to web pages on WordPress. Even though there is no limit on the number of plugins you can install, using too many of them can also harm your site’s speed.

Many bloggers and webmasters use Facebook and Twitter plugins to highlight their social feed directly from their site. While this is an important way of increasing social followers, it is rather unnecessary, as the same can be achieved through coding.

In fact, on the Facebook developer page, you can simply find codes to leverage a hassle-free way to speed up your website load time.

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5. Keep your coding as light as possible

Discussing coding, it is very important to keep your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code base as light as possible by compacting it into as few files as possible. This also relates to the HTTP request issue.

For instance, if your site has 3 JavaScript files, you can easily consolidate these three into one so that only one HTTP request will be made. This is a legitimately effective way to speed up your website load time.

6. Leverage Caching

Caching is another effective way of speeding up your website load time on WordPress. This method stores your web pages temporarily to reduce bandwidth and boost your site’s performance.

By employing this technique, when returning visitors arrives on your site, they will be served a cached version of your webpage, unless it has been altered or updated since the last cache.

By allowing browser catching, returning visitors will have a much faster, and more satisfying experience when visiting your website.

7. Remove Ads that do not convert

Another element that result to a slow loading website are too many displayed ads or affiliate codes.

It has been reported that the click-through rate of banner ads hangs around 0.01%, these are not likely useful to your site or its visitors. Go through the dashboard of your advertising partner account and remove any ads that are not converting or achieving any goal.

Also read: Steps To Get Google AdSense Approval (100% White Hat Method)

8. Use a CDN service

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network service that can deliver your site’s file (CSS, JavaScript, and images) through web servers that are physically closer to your audience’s location. The closer the server to your audience, the faster the load time.

Webmasters can use various CDN services such as Cloudflare, Fastly, or so many others to achieve a nice boost in their website load time.

Conclusion

The goal of every website is definitely to drive revenue and sales and to do that you need a large amount of traffic. The slower your site is, the higher the bounce rate, the lower it goes on SERP (Search Engine Rank Pages), and the less traffic you might get.

You should take your website load time seriously because it can be a major factor for today’s users of the internet. While some features might look appealing on your webpage, if they slow down your site, be rest assured that no one might likely see them.

Simple use the 8 tips outlined above and you might end up having a fast-loading website capable of having great conversions.

Which of these tips have you been using already? Or which other ways have employed to achieve a faster website load time on your WordPress site? kindly make your contribution by using the comment box below.