For every website owner, it is important to learn how to make a WordPress website faster. A fast website is important for several things, but we will come back to that later.
How do I measure my website speed?
First of all, it is important to find out how fast your WordPress website is at the moment. On the internet there are several tools that can help you with this. For example, take a look at GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed or Pingdom. After filling in, you will see a score, but also recommendations to make your website faster.
Why is website speed important?
What difference does it actually make how fast your WordPress website is? Well, the speed of your website is crucial for several reasons. A slow loading speed can have major negative consequences for your business:
1. You will lose website visitors
Did you know that the average attention span of a visitor is only about eight seconds? Then you might be able to imagine what it does to a person if he or she has to wait half that time… So it also turns out that more than half of the users leave a website when the loading time is more than 3 seconds. The (potential) customer has already formed a negative image about you based on your loading time, without having seen anything of the content of your website and product or service.
2. Your conversion will decrease
Another fact: a second delay on your WordPress website reduces conversions by 7%, page views by 11% and customer satisfaction even by 16%. The chance that a visitor will come back to your WordPress website is, after such an experience, a lot lower. And that is of course a shame.
3. Google will punish you
A slow website increases the bounce rate. That is the number of users who leave immediately after landing on the website page. Google sees this as a sign that your WordPress website is not user-friendly and therefore of low quality. The result is that your website will be placed lower in the search engines, and that also has a bad influence on your online visibility and findability.
These are all factors that WordPress SEO meets. Check out our service to see more SEO related parts for your WordPress website.
How do I make WordPress faster?
Now, of course, the question is how you can make your WordPress website faster. There are several steps you can take to increase your score. These steps are also included in our WordPress maintenance package and are part of the WordPress Optimization service.
- Choose a good hosting company
A good hosting company also uses a fast server. Some hosting companies require you to share the space with others. If another user attracts a lot of website visitors, that will also affect your website. There’s nothing you can do about that yourself. If you often suffer from this, it may be better to change hosting companies or opt for a better hosting package. More information can be found on WordPress Hosting.
- Remove unused plugins
Plugins on your WordPress website are super useful and functional, but they can also make your website slower. Therefore, make sure that you only use plugins for essentials and that you uninstall and remove old plugins or unused plugins.
- Use caching
Caching ensures that a copy of your website files is stored on a first visit, so that the website does not have to be loaded all over again when that same visitor comes to visit your WordPress website again. The files do not all have to be reloaded, and that ensures that your website immediately becomes faster. Not every website host offers advanced software for this. In that case, you can arrange this yourself with a plugin, for example ‘W3 Total Cache‘ or ‘WP Rocket‘. Be careful not to set the plugin too strictly, which can cause problems with the theme.
- Optimize your website
The more new content your WordPress website contains, the more waste it entails. By waste we mean, among other things, spam messages, files in your trash and revisions. These are all files that make your website heavier, while these files no longer have a function. So clean up your website by deleting such files. This does not all have to be done manually, there are various tools such as ‘WP-optimize‘ or ‘ManageWP‘. Please note that you always make a backup before you delete files. It can happen that you accidentally throw away the wrong file.
- Resize your images
We still regularly see that people upload the original files from their camera. These images are often very large and that not only slows down the loading of the WordPress website, but it also takes up a lot of space on your hosting package and it ensures that your backups are very large. So first reduce an image before you upload it on your website. For this you can use all kinds of (online) photo editors.
Check out our blog about the importance of good images here. - Retest
Have you applied the above steps? Test your WordPress website again now! We can guarantee that you will see an immediate difference. Do not aim for a score of 100%, because there are few websites that will achieve that. Think like this: small changes can already make a big difference, and so you can always go a step further in this process!
Contact us
Are you unable to get your website better or do you just not have the knowledge to make it a success? No problem! Contact our WordPress specialists, they can help you and recommend the WordPress Maintenance Package which is perfect for your WordPress website. You can reach us on 030 20 72 488 or start and live chat.
