The time it takes your website to load influences how successful it will be. If your website is slow, visitors will turn away in droves. They might even click the back button before your website loads.
Website performance will also influence your rankings in search engines. In addition to being ranked higher, many website owners report seeing an increase in search engine spider crawling after speeding up their design.
Today, I would like to share with you three quick tips on how you can optimize your website and decrease page loading times. If you follow these techniques and best practices, your website will load much quicker.
#1: Choose the Right Hosting Plan
The first step in optimizing your website correctly is to choose the right hosting plan. You are fighting a losing battle if your server is taking an age to process HTTP requests and MySQL commands.
Performance services such as GTMetrix will advise you of the exact response time of your server. I recommend testing the response time of your own website against similar websites. For example, if you run a photography blog, see how your server response time compares to other photography blogs within your niche.
Hosting companies are not always the cause. You may be with a great hosting company but see poor response times because your chosen hosting plan is underpowered. Customers using shared hosting plans, for example, are more likely to face slow loading times as hundreds of websites are hosted on the same server.
However, any type of hosting plan will suffer from insufficient RAM and CPU throttling. Therefore, you need to pay attention to what your website needs to run smoothly. Do not be a cheapskate and go for the cheapest option. Choose a hosting plan that can handle traffic spikes efficiently.
As far as my experience goes, Hostinger is one of the best hosting company with amazing services. You can absolutely try them. If you are not satisfied they have 100% money back guarantee. I bet, you would never turn around once you are with them.
#2: WordPress Theme
A design that has been coded badly, or uses images throughout the design, will add unnecessary weight to your page. It is not uncommon for some WordPress themes to be a few megabytes in size. Such a design could add a few seconds to your page loading time.
Choose a design that has been optimized for desktops, tablets and mobile devices. Search engines favor responsive designs as they ensure all pages have the same URL, however adaptive designs that were created specifically for mobile phones can improve a mobile user’s experience considerably (it is not uncommon for an adaptive design to reduce page size by over one megabyte).
Unfortunately, most theme developers optimize their theme demo website using caching and content delivery networks. This makes is difficult to know how quick a WordPress design is before using it yourself.
#3: Optimize your images:
Images can help break up long pieces of text and can help your articles be shared more frequently on social media services; however they also take up a lot of storage. Therefore, pages that contain many images can take a long time to load.
It is therefore in your best interests to optimise your images for the internet before you upload them to your website. Most photo editing applications, such as Photoshop, allow you to do this via the “Save for Web” option.
Also there are many plugins out there which can help you in doing so. But optimizing images can absolutely make your site superfast.
In conclusion:
Optimizing your website is no longer an option. With search engines placing so much importance on the speed of web pages, it is vital to your website’s success to have fast loading web pages.
A lot of people wrongly assume that you need to be an expert to optimize a WordPress website. Nothing could be further from the truth. 99% of optimizing your website correctly is following good practices and taking advantage of caching and content delivery networks.
I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial on optimization. Also I would appreciate if you can leave your hosting feedback here - which host is better or which one is the best as per you, also the kind of plugins that can help anyone to optimize WordPress. I’ll be much too grateful for your time and energy that you spent in this.
Thanks in advance,
Aditya Bhavsar.