How to make WordPress faster

Improve the speed of your WordPress website

Website speed is really, really important. It isn’t something any of us should overlook

It has been an important part of marketing efforts for some time now.

A big part of this is the high value Google seems to put on the speed and security of your website as part of their ranking algorithm. The algorithm is of course Google’s special sauce so we are not really aware of what exactly is inside.

How can I create a speedy WordPress website.

There are tools available to help highlight speed issues with your website, whether it is built in WordPress or on another platform.

These include:

  • Pingdom
  • GTMetrix
  • Google’s Page Speed Insights

We use all 3 as each might offer insights that help reach your goal of a fast WordPress website.

As an example this website does very well on PageSpeed Insights with a consistent score of 98% on mobile and 100% on desktop:

Page Speed Insights for Merseyside.agency on mobile

Page Speed Insights for Merseyside.Agency Mobile

Page Speed Insights for Merseyside.agency on desktop

Google gives a separate breakdown for mobile and desktop. This is great because it helps us to prioritise fixes. Note that Google prioritises mobile for search ranking now as part of their mobile first apprach.

This is not a one-off either. Take a look at the site we designed and developed for MundoNovus where we have consistently achieved scores of 99% for mobile and 100% for desktop:

Page Speed Insights for Mundonovus on mobile

Page Speed Insights for MundoNovus on desktop

Page Speed insights for MundoNovus.com on desktop

Why should we care about the speed of our WordPress websites?

Being able to measure the page speed and fix any issues that these three tools show is of benefit to your site for a number of reasons:

  • Firstly, as already mentioned speed affects search engine rankings, so impacts whether people ever arrive at your site;
  • Secondly, as Kissmetrics found, the longer a site takes to load the more people abandon it to look elsewhere, literally driving your customers away. Not a good practice and one that can be fixed;
  • Thirdly, as seen in Kissmetrics report above, for every second delay in page load a 7% decrease in conversions can be expected.

The business case is clear, you need a faster site.

The decrease in conversions alone could be leaving money on the table.

If you had an online store turning over £500,000 every year, a single second delay in loading would be equivalent to £35,000 you could miss out on in sales each year.

What can be done to help

There are a number of things that might help. They include:

  • Moving to better hosting, we partner with WPEngine for this purpose;
  • Using a Content Delivery Network;
  • Make sure your site core, plugins and PHP version are up to date;
  • Refactoring the code that shows your site to make sure it is not bloating your site;
  • Put off loading elements until they are required, such as images or video;
  • Optimise and minimise the code on your site;
  • Use compression to deliver your site code across networks.

Now many of these might not be familiar to you, and some of them can be daunting and technical. But, that is where we come in and help.

We have proven that we know what to do to gain the most out of your site. You can check our site yourself on Google’s Page Speed Insights.

Once you have, be sure to get in touch so we can help you get that speedy site that will help your business be more profitable.

By: merseyside

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