Portent ran a study that looked at just over 94 million pages across 10 eCommerce sites. They found website conversions dropped by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time between zero and five seconds. That's huge. And this is what we are going to help you with thanks to the 5 steps for websites speed optimisation from our top SEO experts in London.
You can basically lose money by just having poor load time.
But don’t worry, in this article we are going to break down for you how to speed up your WordPress website in just 5 steps
Hi there, and welcome back to Serendipity Marketing. We're a digital marketing agency with a mission to help small businesses grow by applying psychology to their marketing strategies.
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Before we get started, we have a question for you; How long does your website take to load?
If you don't know, you can search on Google “website speed analyser” and you’ll find pages that tell you how long your website takes to load.
So, in this article, we are now going to be focused on speed, but if you want to optimise your WordPress site for SEO, we have an article in our blog that will walk you through the perfect SEO setup for WordPress with the best plugins that you can use. You can just click here to read it.
So, the first thing that you want to do is check your WordPress site speed. That's pretty much easy. Once again, you can search on Google “website speed analyser” and you’ll find pages that tell you how long your website takes to load. Many pages will even tell you what to do to fix it.
You should aim for a load time of fewer than three seconds.
1. Fix what could slow down your website
Let’s get to see some things that'll slow down your WordPress site.
Web hosting
When your web hosting server is not properly configured, it can hurt your website. You want to make sure your host is also fast.
WordPress configuration
If your WordPress configuration is not serving cast pages, that means a page has to load up all over again even as the same page a hundred other people viewed earlier that day, it can slow down your website or make your website crash entirely.
Usually not with a hundred visitors, but if it was a million, definitely going to increase some issues.
Page size
Mainly images that aren't optimized for the web will slow down the loading speed. The bigger the images, the longer they take the load.
Now, you can compress the image. We are not talking about the size and shrinking it down because bigger images tend to do well and people like bigger images, but we are talking about the file size. Compress that down while maintaining the quality.
Bad plugins
If you're using poorly coded plugins, then you're going to see a slowdown in your site, especially if you have one too many plugins.
We see some people's WordPress that after we login, we are like, "Holy crap, this is like Nascar, literally." They have so many plugins. It can fill a Nascar or Formula One car with them.
This happens because a lot of them do the same thing over and over again.
External scripts
How many of you have external scripts on your WordPress site? Leave a comment below with the scripts that you have.
We'll give you one. You probably use Google Analytics, but leave a comment below with the rest of the scripts you use.
You probably don't need more than a handful.
Alright, now before we move on with what you have to add to your WordPress to make it load faster from our SEO experts in London, have you ever thought about how much you should invest in marketing to generate constant business growth? Click the button below to calculate the ideal marketing budget you should allocate for higher visibility, engagement, and profit.
How much should you invest in Digital Marketing?
2. Use Cache Plugin
The second thing that you'll want to do is install some kind of cache plugin. If you don't use caching, every time someone goes to your website, WordPress needs to then generate that page dynamically all over again. Don't do that to your server. Be kind and nice to your server.
When you start getting lots of website visitors, it'll save time, it won't overload your servers as much and people will have a much better experience.
That means your WordPress system won't need to work as heavily and this can make your website load anywhere from two to five times faster. That's a lot.
And if you want a free plugin that does pretty well, use WP Super Cache.
3. Optimize your images
Images and video content are really heavy, especially on mobile devices. Think about it, just because you have a 5G phone doesn't mean you have 5G reception. So, compress them.
4. Use a CDN
This is almost mandatory. A CDN is a content delivery network. Just thinking about the Serendipity Marketing website, it's hosted in the United Kingdom, but did you know that if you pull up our website from the US, it actually gets pulled up from a site that's in the US or a server more so that's in the US.
That's a CDN. That's a content delivery network. It's taking my files from my site, even though they're hosted in the United Kingdom, and putting them on servers all over the world.
This way, if you're coming from the US, Spain, or Italy, it's pinging the closest server to pull up that data.
And you can use tools like Cloudflare for this. And a lot of the hosts that you use also offer CDNs.
5. Lazy loading
Think about this, if you have long content, let's say 5,000 or 10,000 words, you don't want to have to load the whole page before someone can read the content.
You want to load section by section as quickly as possible so people can start reading it as they're reading, more information gets loaded up.
And that's what's cool about lazy loading. We found that in regions that don't have the best internet connection when we started using lazy loading for our visitors, that way people can get access to the content faster.
If you need help with your WordPress website speed or SEO to grow your business in terms of visibility, engagement, and profit, contact us today and speak with one of our digital marketing experts to see how we can build the bridge between the point you’re standing at right now and your goals.
