If you own a WordPress site, chances are that you want to reduce the loading time of the landing page to improve user experience and also optimize your site for best performance using WordPress SEO tools (search engine optimization).
Research proves that the average human attention span on the internet is 7 seconds and that number keeps dropping every year. As a website owner, this means that your website’s content must fully load in less than 3 seconds or risk losing your potential customer. In essence, speeding up your WordPress website will attract more traffic, customers and revenue.
As experts, we have taken the liberty of providing a short and thorough guide to WordPress performance optimization. Let’s dive into the details.
A speed test for your website is the first thing you should do. This is important because due to frequent visitation, your website may load faster on your browser. Unfortunately, this may not be the case for other normal first-time visitors.
Getting a speed test from the right source will help you understand what slows down your WordPress website by providing several recommendations on how to boost your website’s speed.
Let’s take a look at other relevant factors many WordPress website owners often overlook.
Choose a decent web hosting service that supports WordPress
If your WordPress website is your main source of income, then it’s necessary to get the best hosting available, because it will directly affect how much money your business makes. If you want to make a lot of money, you’ll need to spend more on your hosting.
Ultimately, a boost in revenue as a result of frequent visitors will cover the expenses.
The quality of your WordPress hosting service is also important. Shared hosting services pile multiple sites on the same server which causes very slow and unreliable hosting.
However, a managed WordPress hosting service can provide optimized server configurations to run WordPress. Managed WordPress hosting services also offer automatic backups, WordPress updates, and more advanced security configurations to protect your website.
Another point is making sure you host your website in the country where the bulk of your visitors or customers are located.
Caching for WordPress Websites
Another great way of boosting WordPress speed is by caching. WordPress works by rebuilding your page to satisfy the user’s intent. When someone visits a page on your WordPress website built using PHP, your server retrieves data from a MySQL database and your PHP files, and then compiles it into an HTML content which is shown to the user.
In the event of having multiple visitors at once, this process will slow down your website. Caching assembles each page on your site to show the user before they request the page from your web server. By doing this your WordPress website becomes twice as fast.
Optimizing video size for WordPress
Many internet users prefer to watch videos as it is more time saving and convenient. Having videos and images on the content of the WordPress page will boost engagement, but only if they load and play quickly.
So before you upload a video directly to your site, we suggest using a free video editing software like Freemake Video Converter to optimize your video content by reducing the huge file size while maintaining good quality. Using this free converter, you can smoothly change the video formats to suit your WordPress website. Learn how to do this here.
WordPress includes a variety of tools and plugins for optimizing content for SEO. Adding these plugins and choosing a mobile-friendly website theme will ensure your WordPress website is constantly updated and your website will rank higher for your keywords.
