Is your WordPress website running slowly? This case study highlights five tips to hurry up your website.
Website speed is vital for SEO rankings and user experience.
Compare your site speed against your competitors.
Five steps one can fancy make significant improvements in site speed
Most commercial websites globally have two key objectives:
Maximize traffic
Convert that traffic to leads/sales
Site speed directly impacts both. It’s a key rankings factor for search engines like Google/Bing, and it has an immediate impact on conversion rate, as shown by Amazon’s testing. I manage a digital agency of several Australia’s largest websites, so I wanted to prove how briskly an internet site is often during a perfect scenario and, therefore, the steps for this to be done.
How do I measure site speed?
Like most areas of selling, it is vital to living performance and benchmark it to your competitors.
Measuring for Google (SEO)
To see how search engines grade a page for site speed, I like to recommend using this free Google tool. Google created this device supported lighthouse, and you’ll do unlimited testing, so I might recommend comparing your website score to competitors outranking you for a specific term as a benchmark. The opposite feature I prefer about this tool is that you can keep a history of past tests if you’re logged in once you run them.
Measuring for the user experience
Getting a erase of 100 is excellent, but what about the particular time taken for a page to load. In my experience, two reliable tests permit you test by region:
Pingdom
GT Metrix
Again, I do not want you to specialize in the particular score, but what your score is compared to the websites that you’re competing against. The aim isn’t to possess the fastest website within the world but rather, to a minimum of the match if not beat your competitors.
I’m using my website Compare Forex Brokers for the steps taken for our case study. As Compare Forex Brokers is made on WordPress, some levels may differ if you’re employing a different platform. These are so as of importance.
1. Website hosting
The most crucial factor that impacts site speed is your hosting provider. It’s impressive what proportion money. Many of my clients have spent on coding to enhance speed when changing hosting providers would have achieved better outcomes. Choosing the proper hosting provider is pretty simple:
The hosting provider must be cloud-based (physical servers are getting a thing of the past)
The hosting provider must have a knowledge center within the region where your customers are located (i.e., Australia)
The hosting provider must be reliable.
I went for a Google Cloud provider who specialized in WordPress, referred to as Kinsta. You’ll see their site speed benchmarking study showing the logic for why I chose them. Kinsta’s clients report a forty-five-speed increase when migrating across. Believe it, 45% improvement just by changing servers, which for many people, is pretty painless! This is often why Website hosting should be your first consideration before anything.
2. WordPress + PHP updates
Just like with Windows, WordPress (and plugins) regularly offer updates. Updates are periodically released tighten security and improve performance. Despite this, it’s incredible what percentage websites aren’t accepting these updates annually.
In addition to updates of WordPress, there’s another product commonly overlooked that needs updating; this is often your PHP version. PHP provides the back-end to a WordPress website, so it should be updated every few months. this text also shows the performance improvements with each PHP version. If you select a WordPress hosting provider, upgrading the PHP version is often a click of a button.
3. Image and video optimization
To get the foremost out of image optimization, i like to recommend the plugin “short pixel Image Optimizer.” short pixel makes it easy to scale back your image size which successively will increase your website performance. To make sure your images keep their integrity (i.e., if it’s the text within the model) when compressed, then you ought to save the picture as a .png file (not a .jpeg file). A .png image won’t summarize the maximum amount, but it’ll maintain top quality unlike a .jpeg, which may degrade.
Videos, very similar to images, are an excellent feature to stay your audience engaged; however, if not added to your website correctly can impact the user experience. Instead of upload videos directly into WordPress, I like to recommend uploading the video into YouTube; this may keep resources on your WordPress site free. Once you’ve got done this, I want to recommend installing the straightforward YouTube Responsive plugin. The straightforward YouTube responsible plugin ensures your videos behave ‘responsibly,’ which suggests your videos will scale to the dimensions of the device your audience is using to look at the videos.
While most people concentrate on the image and video optimization (and it’s certainly worth doing), it’s essential not to neglect the primary two steps discussed as these have a much more significant impact on website speed.
4. Employing a content delivery network (CDN)
Having fast hosting is excellent, but it’ll be served out of a neighborhood (i.e., U.K.). If you would like your site to be fast outside of those regions, then employing a CDN will allow your website to cache overseas then load faster.
CDN networks improve site speed by copying your static content on a network of servers around the world. When one among your users must access content like images, CSS style sheets, and on-demand videos, your content is drawn from the server closest to the user.
There are three pricing levels when it involves a CDN.
A Cloudflare account. This feature is free but may have some limitations if you’ve got tons of static content.
CDN networks from hosting providers. Hosting providers offer discounted packages that can fit your needs.
A Cloudflare Business account, which is USD 200. this is often the ‘gold standard’ during a CDN solution.
If your website does get severe traffic and relies on overseas users, then it’s worth considering a Cloudflare Business account.
5. Removing Third Party Advertising
Third-party advertising like DoubleClick, Adroll, or maybe Facebook can hamper an internet site. If these are a critical component of your marketing campaign, then keep them, but otherwise, you would like to get rid of them ASAP.
Googles own third-party advertising feature Google Analytics Remarketing bogged down compareforexbrokers.com by 0.8 seconds. A useful plugin to modify off Google Analytics Remarketing and manage third-party advertising sites I prefer to use is Perfmatters.
How did fixing these five elements improve my website?
Actioning these elements (and several more) led the foremost critical forex broker page site speed to extend from 57/100 to 93/100 using Google Site Speed (Lighthouse).
Watching the ‘site speed’ index, it went from 5.3 to 2.4 alone.
Other metrics that showed improvement include First Conceptual Paint which measures what proportion time before the location shows the primary element of the situation (thanks to raised loading) and Max Potential First Input Delay which measures the time taken from when the user first interacts with the location to have the ability to reply because of moving to Kinsta. Consistent with Pingdom, the situation in Sydney now loads in 0.422 seconds (it was over 2 seconds prior).
Once you’ve got compared your site speed against your competitors, you’ll gain a foothold by implementing these five actionable steps I even have to provide, which can make an immediate and lasting impact on site speed. These steps are
Switch to a hosting provider that gives fast hosting
Update WordPress and PHP versions
Optimize your images and videos
Consider which Content Delivery Network is best for you.
Remove third party advertising.
The key takeaway I would like you to urge from this guide is to think about changing the hosting provider and upgrading your WordPress/PHP version first before the other site speed action. These are the most straightforward steps you’ll take and can have the most critical impact to enhance your sites speed.
