Cut Your Site Speed in Half: Make WordPress Load Fast
People don't have enough patience for waiting for websites to load. Impatience of users often cause of high bounce rate. Find out how to cut your site speed in half and provide the best user experience for your visitors.
WordPress is currently being used to power more than 31% of all sites on the web. The secret behind its popularity is the fact that it enables individuals without much technical knowledge to get a website up and running in record time. And with the wealth of customization options available, it's easy to create a website that stands out from the crowd.
Unfortunately, WordPress users sometimes tend to go a bit too far with their customizations, which often results in websites that are slow to load. This is problematic for two reasons. One, long loading times will directly impact your site’s search engine rank, as site load speed is a confirmed ranking factor. Two, long waiting times will impoverish your user experience, leading to higher bounce rates, lower average time on page, and reduced conversions. It is therefore imperative to take the appropriate measures for making your WordPress site load as fast as possible.
Since there are already plenty of articles on the web on the topic of improving site load speed, we will instead focus on how your choice of WordPress plugins can affect loading speed.Caching Plugins
The purpose of a caching plugin is to cache your WordPress posts and pages as static files. These static files are then served to users, thus reducing server processing load. Using caching plugins can provide substantial performance gains if your website contains mostly static pages. Popular caching plugins include:Minification Plugins
Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters like whitespaces and newlines from the source code of a website without changing its functionality. Minification plugins reduce the filesize of your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, which can improve page load speed by a couple of percents. Popular minification plugins include:Image Compression Plugins
Images file size is a major contributor to slow loading speeds, especially for content-heavy WordPress websites. The solution to this problem is to utilize an image compression plugin. These add-ons work by converting images into 'lossy' formats with smaller file sizes while trying to maintain the same level of quality. Examples of image compression plugins include:Database Optimization Plugins
Cluttered databases are a common cause of slow website load speed. Over time, databases tend to get bogged down by storing unnecessary files, which increases the time needed to find and fetch relevant ones. WordPress supports a number of plugins for database cleanup and maintenance, including the following:
General Performance Tips
Apart from plugin-based speed optimizations, there are also a number of platform-agnostic strategies which you can implement to further reduce page load speed. These practices work equally well for content management systems other than WordPress, including Joomla, Drupal, and Magento.Other Plugins
Site load speed can also be improved by implementing various small-scale optimizations. The impact of these optimizations is usually negligible when they are applied in isolation, but they can be quite effective when paired up with each other. Most of them can be implemented through the use of appropriate plugins, such as:Conclusion
Speed is one of the most important factors for the success of any website. Fortunately, by using the right WordPress plugins, you can significantly improve your page load times, earning you the favor of both search engines and your audience.
