Website optimization
WordPress offers a lot of possibilities to make your website look as professional as possible. With plug-ins and widgets you can add many useful functionalities to your website. Nice, you might think, but a big disadvantage is that these plugins and widgets make your website unnecessarily heavy, making your website a lot slower. And you don’t want that, because every extra second of loading time is going to cost your visitors.
Why is a fast website important?
You may think we’re exaggerating, but research by Google (source) has shown that 53% of mobile visitors leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load the page! That’s more than half who drop out! And then to think that more than half of the Netherlands nowadays also makes purchases via his / her mobile phone. So every second counts and can even cost you revenue…
Wait! You don’t have to remove all your plugins and widgets right away though. Although the plugins and widgets make your website heavier, they can also be very important for your company. Moreover, Google likes user-friendly websites. So don’t be too frugal with plugins and widgets. The solution? Optimize your WordPress website. And do this regularly, because unfortunately this is not a job that you can do once.
Tips for optimizing your WordPress website
- Use fast web hosting
Web hosting is super important for your website. You can compare it with an internet provider. You just want to be always reachable and the internet always working. So do not choose the cheapest hosting company. They will not score high in terms of quality, safety, user-friendliness and service. And that’s going to end up costing you money. - Optimize your images
It often happens that images are uploaded with the actual size, but that is often unnecessary. By optimizing the image, excess data is removed from the image and the image takes up less space. As a result, the website can be loaded up to 80% faster. - Install a WordPress caching plugin
This story gets a bit more complicated, but the bottom line is that WordPress has to do a whole process every time to find the required information, put it all together, and then show it to the user. A caching plugin makes a copy of the page after the first load and then loads it into the cached version for each subsequent user. This can make your WordPress website up to 5 times faster. - Check out all your WordPress plugins and widgets
Some plug-ins and widgets require a lot of memory and/or loading time. Consider whether each installed plugin or widget is an addition to your WordPress website. Check all plugins and replace those that perform poorly for a better plugin. - Keep your database as clean as possible
The larger your database, the more time it takes to retrieve the data. So keep it as small and clean as possible. You do this, among other things, by deleting your post revisions, checking and deleting the amount of spam comments, and regularly optimizing the database.
And so there are many more tips to help you website. Optimizing a WordPress website is not a higher mathematics, but it is important to do regularly and well! Some optimizations are easier than the other, but actually it starts all when using high-quality WordPress hosting. From there you can get started with other optimizations step by step.
Help with optimizing
Can’t see the forest for the trees anymore? Or want to you don’t bother with optimizing your WordPress website at all? Then let us help you! We are specialized in WordPress websites and we know how to do things: we carry out various tests during our work. We check and optimize things like the database and revisions, and we clean up the spam responses. We compress scripts, images, stylesheets and other files and we add a CDN.
We realize that it is important to optimize a website for two parties: visitors and search engines. As we said before; visitors have a short tension arc and drop out at a long(er) loading time and slow websites will be placed lower in Google. With that in mind, we get to work and help you create a fast website. Furthermore, it is up to you how far we go in the optimization process. Do you need advice? Please contact us for the possibilities. Start a live chat or call us on 030 20 72 488.
