Do you want to boost your business revenue unprecedentedly? However, your website’s inefficient performance is the major obstacle to fulfilling your goal. When I say inefficient, I mean multiple factors acting as stumbling blocks, one being poor website speed.
Imagine clicking on a web store to buy a product, and all you see is a spinning loading icon. Seconds, and even minutes, have passed, but you are still waiting to move forward. Frustrating experience, isn’t it?
Now, put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. Do you really think that your visitors will like to come to your website again, knowing its slow loading time? That just gives them a poor user experience. So, what can you do to improve your user experience and convert them into your loyal customers?
Well, our recommendation will be to check your WordPress website speed and performance if that is the source of your poor business revenue. Here’s how:
What is WordPress Speed Optimization
Let’s start with the basics: “What is WordPress speed optimization?” It involves improving the loading time of your pages. Well, to be honest, it is a solution to boost the performance of your website, all with the goal of improving the experience of users on your website, ultimately turning them into permanent visitors or, better say, a constant source of traffic. Apart from that, it also contributes considerably to putting you in the good books of Google algorithms, helping you get a definite edge when it comes to ranking organically over search engines.
How to Boost WordPress Speed & Performance
Choose the Right Hosting Provider
According to the statistics, 40% of visitors will leave the website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Here comes the role of the hosting provider, which ensures fast loading speed. It would not be wrong to say that choosing a good and reliable hosting provider is one of the things that can be a make-or-break point for your online business success. Still, a lot of business owners undervalue its importance and opt for a cheap hosting provider. What happens ultimately is the substandard performance of your website. So, what you can do to boost your website performance:
- Don’t rely on shared hosting, as it will limit your site’s ability to handle high traffic volume.
- Don’t choose lower bandwidth, as it can contribute to poor data transfer speed between you and your visitors.
- Go for VPS (Virtual Private Server) and managed WordPress hosting to shorten the loading time and optimize your WordPress performance.
Optimize The Images and Media Files
Images play an important role in increasing the visual attractiveness of your website. They are the best way to show your product and get attention and engagement. Quite obviously, you cannot remove them from your website just because they are putting a heavy toll on your WordPress website’s speed and performance. A much better way is to optimize the images, media files, and other heavy content. Here are some ways you can do that:
- Compress the image before uploading it to your website. Make sure its size is 500KB or less.
- Implement lazy loading. This way, essential things will load first. For example, the images that are at the top will load first, and as the user scrolls down, the other pictorial depictions will start appearing.
Install WordPress Cache Plugin
Whenever you make some changes to your website, it does not update on its own at the front end. You have to clear the cache so that the changes become active on your website. In other words, clearing the cache speeds up the speed and performance of WordPress website. To efficiently handle cache, you can install cache management plugins like LiteSpeed Cache.
Choose the Closest Server Location
Choosing a server location that is in close territorial proximity is one factor that can considerably help you boost your website speed and performance. Remember, the longer the distance, the longer the time will be to receive and process the request. So, know your target audience and choose a server closer to them to avoid high latency. However, if you have already signed up for a hosting plan and have not considered the server location. Now, what you can do? In that case, just contact your hosting provider to change the server location.
Select the Well-Optimized WordPress Theme
A WordPress theme can also affect your website’s speed and performance. So, choosing a well-optimized one is an essential requirement for effectively running your online business. We have charted out the following criteria to help you in choosing the right and well-optimized theme:
- Check the theme code with tools like HTML Markup Validation Service and plugins like Theme Checker.
- Use a lightweight theme with less clutter and CSS or JavaScript file sizes under 100KB.
- Incorporate Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) so that you can load your WordPress sites faster on mobile devices.
It’s best to check your website theme before finalizing it. Also, check the speed of your website on each theme.
Other Important Things to Consider
- Uninstall deactivated plugins.
- Use the latest PHP, a scripting language that is used on all websites.
- Keep updating your WordPress theme, core, and plugins regularly.
- Optimize the WordPress database occasionally. But make sure to back up your data before optimizing your WordPress website.
Final Thoughts
Your WordPress website speed and performance aren’t something to ignore. They greatly influence bounce rate, SEO rankings, and incoming traffic. So, you must consider it one way to boost your business revenue considerably. According to WebFX stats, “Nearly 70% of users say that an online retailer’s site speed impacts how willing they are to buy from that retailer.”
If you encounter issues related to website performance and speed and are unsure how to resolve them, contact UnityDiv now. Our high brains know how to resolve this task really well.
