Studies show that each additional second of load time can make your website conversions drop by an average of 4.42%, says Digital Googly, a web development company in New Jersey.
What it means is that if you have a poor website speed, you might be losing a significant amount of sales opportunity. It is a cause of concern for many WordPress website owners.
How long does your website take to load? If it takes more than five seconds, you need to read this blog, roll up your sleeves and get to work. Even if it takes less than five seconds, our tips can help you maximize your loading speed.
However, before getting to the tips, let’s find out what might be hurting your website speed.
Here Are Some Things That Can Slow Down Your Word Press Site
- Web Hosting Server – Hosting servers that are not correctly configured can reduce your website loading speed. Therefore, while choosing a web-hosting service, ensure that they can support the volume of viewership you’re aiming to reach.
- WordPress Configuration – WordPress websites that are incorrectly configured will have loading issues, says the web development company in New Jersey. If the website contents are not correctly cached, it can overload a requesting server, hurting your website loading speed.
- Page Size – If your website consists of unoptimized large-sized images, it definitely stretches your website’s loading time.
- Bad Plugins – Poorly coded plugins can significantly slow down your site, primarily if you use too many of them.
- External Scripts – WordPress sites can get bogged down by third-party ads and redirections, hindering fast-loading metrics.
Speed Up Your Website with These Five Steps
Now that you know what might be causing your website to slow down, here are five tips from Digital Googly, a web design and development company in New Jersey, to turn the table in your favor.
Install a Cache Plugin
Did you ever notice that it takes some time to load when you visit a web page for the first time? However, it loads a lot faster when you visit it later on. The reason is a cache plugin.
When you visit a website for the first time, it loads slower because your computer downloads all the data (text, images, video, etc.) for the first time. If the website you visited contains a cache plugin, it develops a stripped-down HTML script of the data and stores it in your computer. Therefore, when you visit the website for the second time, it will load faster as some parts will already be stored in your computer.
Optimize Your Images
Images or video content are heavy files that significantly impact your website loading speed, especially on mobile devices.
According to the web design company in New Jersey, reducing image and video file size can improve your loading speed by 2X.
Use A CDN
If you want people from all over the world to visit your site and enjoy the same speed and efficiency as your local consumers, use a CDN. CDN is a Content Delivery Network that helps keep your site’s loading speed to a minimum for visitors from various countries.
A CDN works by keeping a copy of your website in various data centers. For instance, if your website is getting hosted in India and you want to efficiently expand your website to the USA, CDN will make a copy of your website and keep it in a data center in the USA.
Therefore, when a prospect from the USA visits your website, your data will be pulled from the nearest location, resulting in an increased loading speed. According to the best web development company in New Jersey, Cloudflare and MaxCDN are among the best CDN services that you can use.
Cleanup WordPress Database
Deleting unwanted data like spam comments, old drafts of your content and even unwanted plugins and themes will significantly reduce the size of your database and speed up your WordPress.
Lazy Loading
If your webpage has content that stretches to 5000 or even 10,000 words, along with images and other objects, it might take “ages” to load. This is where lazy loading can help, according to Digital Googly, a web development company in New Jersey.
Lazy loading is the practice of delaying loading your website data or objects until they’re actually needed to improve performance and save system resources. For example,if your web page has a high-quality image that a user has to scroll down to see, you can display a placeholder and lazy load the full image only when the user scrolls down to its location. The approach quickens the load time of web pages and conserves server and client resources. It encourages visitors with less efficient internet connections to check out your content, reducing your bounce rates significantly.
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