Face it – if your WordPress site shows slower response times, it’s doing you no favours. You can lose customers, put chance visitors off, fritter away hard-earned goodwill and reputation and serve business up on a platter to your competitor – all because of slow load speeds.
Why stay up to speed?
Studies show that if a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load, people move on. About 75% of them never return and 43% tend to share their disappointing experience with friends. This means you have limited time to display your content to visitors and encourage them to stay on and convert those clicks into revenue down the line. Google and other search engines penalise slow websites by featuring them at lower ranking positions on search result pages. This means less traffic, less visibility and low consumer interest for your site, and in turn for your products and services.
How to fix the speed problem
You need to identify the reason for slow speed before you fix it.
- Check Your Speed: Test out your speed first. You could have a bad connection, slow internet or bugs in the website that slow your speed down. Use tools like Google’s Page Speed Insight, GT Metrix, Pingdom, etc to verify and quantify the problem. You get results that include server response time, page redirects, image optimization etc that give you the right information.
- Plugins: What everyone loves about WordPress is that it’s plugin friendly. You can customize and optimise your site with the help of these. Too many of them may have overloaded your site. Do some smart housekeeping – remove/replace plugins you don’t use or need.
- High-Quality Web Host: Switch to a higher-quality host with HTTP2 protocol support.
- Caching: is a WP essential. It pre-builds each page before it’s served up to visitors.
- Image Compression: Images can be compressed from 30-40% without significant impact. This can shave 1 or 2 seconds off your load-times. Other things that slow your site down include page size and external scripts.
- Updates: Keep your site updated in terms of themes and plugins.
For more assistance on identifying why WordPress is slow and fixing the problem, speak to Studio Licious Group today.
