I decided to write about practical steps how you can optimize your wordpress websites for speed because i keep getting people asking lots of questions about how to make their wordpress website load faster.
Before i share these steps with you, do you know a slow website can do more harm to your business?
- A slow website can cause poor or no sales at all.
- Reduce how many visitors you get
- Discourages website engagements. ( Ever wondered why no one has ever contacted you via your website), etc
I really feel your challenges, I have been there before. When a website isn’t adding value to your business, domain and hosting renewals seems like a burden.
No worries, we offer a full website audit service.
PRACTICAL STEPS TO MAKE YOUR WEBSITE LOAD FASTER
Step 1: Theme
On good thing about wordpress is that you have varieties of readymade templates you can use on your website (free or paid).
You can check out, themeforest for premium wordpress themes.
The bad side is some of these readymade templates contains too many scripts and resources that may end up causing your website to load very slow.
Recently, a client from australia ontacted us and her complain was her website speed test score on gtmetrix and google pagespeed insight was really poor (F). After our audit, we realized her theme was the major cause of her website poor performance.
I recommend, after installing that beautiful theme on your website make sure you test its performance.
Recommendations: Use a light theme on your website
Step 2: Plugins
When we redesign websites for clients, I’m always amazed at the number of active plugins on some websites. Having a long list of active plugins on your website will definitely affect the speed (response server time)
Recommendations: Use few plugins, cache plugin ( lite speed is what i use and i really recommend because it is compatible with cloudfare CDN)
Using a CDN on your website helps improve the speed especially if you use a shared hosting. I use Cloudfare
Step 3: Image
Having images on your website is really nice but do you check the file size. An image size of 1mb is too large.
Tip: If the image isn’t used for slider then resize to 640 width. Tool you can use is Paint on windows.
Once the image is resized, you can still go further to compress without losing quality ( i make use of jpegcompress)
Step 4: Video
Don’t upload a video directly to your website server, it’s recommended you embed with youtube or vimeo.
Apply this steps on your website and you will be amazed with the results and performance of your website.
You can always contact us for your website audit, website design.
Don’t have time to manage your website? Check out our website management services.