Your WordPress site speed is one of the crucial aspects of your optimization work due to your visitors’ expectations of fast and smooth experience on it. Today you will see what contributes to site speed on WordPress, how you can measure your website speed, and how to improve your site speed in case it’s necessary.
What impacts your site speed on WordPress
Among primary contributors to your WordPress site speed factors are third-party plugins and themes. But keep in mind that they can’t be added on sites without a Business or eCommerce plan. The users of Free, Personal, and Premium plans are limited in plugin usage. Also, they can only use built-in WordPress themes which are commonly well-built and are not affecting site load speed.
The owners of WordPress websites should avoid creating posts and pages stuffed with unoptimized images which will definitely affect their loading speed. And in case some problems occur, let’s see what you can do to solve them.
You should always be careful and only use plugins that has proved their clarity and efficiency whithout hurting the page loading time. Such a tool is Google Reviews Wordpress plugin from Elfsight. Reviews are essential for any website.
Best Practices to Speed up WordPress Site
Here you’ll see the list of the best tools you can apply to inspect your WordPress site, along with some notes on how to develop the site's mobile performance. You’ll also get a chance to look through some statistical data to underline the significance of loading speed in respect to ranking and revenue. They are easy to run and carry out on any WordPress page.
Google Speed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a Google tool that is aimed at testing and improving a website performance, no matter which device is used. Applying this tool, you’ll be aware of any website’s performance score. It should be emphasized that Google PageSpeed score is performed with the preset settings, such as device and connectivity. In this way, this rate doesn’t reflect actual user experience out-and-out.
PageSpeed Insights also displays actual data that can be observed in the Field data section of the Chrome User Experience Report. This rests upon the Google Chrome combined info that the browser acquires from the users. The section as such is really rewarding as it catches real user experience
How to Speed Up Site On Mobile
Below are five simple steps you can follow in order to improve mobile performance of your WordPress website:
Evaluating the speed of your site’s mobile version.
You can apply popular services like Test My Site, for instance, that analyse your site's mobile performance and offer personalized tips for developing.
Decreasing your website pages’ weight.
Lots of ecommerce websites happen to be not really easy to load on mobiles. Loading speed is of high importance for mobile users, and you shouldn’t make them wait more than several seconds. Try to create pages that weigh less than 1 MB.
Getting rid of picture carousels.
Your WordPress website visitors will only look at the first picture of a carousel and will proceed to scrolling your site further. So if there’s an urgency to reduce page weight now, the first thing to weed out is auto carousels on the mobile version of your WordPress site.
Optimizing search on your website.
Inspire and drive your WordPress site visitors to commence their journey with searching through your website! Place the search box in the top of your mobile site version to emphasize it. And think about implementing typos autocorrect to make the mobile search more user-friendly.
Enhance the efficiency of the checkout.
It’s crucial for ecommerce brands not to make the checkout process on their websites too long. That’s why it’s great when your site recognizes the returning customers and their purchase info. Think of integrating online payment services like PayPal or Google Pay, so that your audience could make a buy in a few clicks or taps.
How Big of Impact Site Speed Has on SEO
Back in 2010, Google said that sites’ loading speed will become a ranking signal. The overall website performance has become more significant since then, and loading speed tailoring is at the moment a huge part of SEO strategies. It’s apparent that a slow site has a detrimental effect on user experience and visitors do not land on websites that load slowly. And of course they won’t come to such websites to look for an answer to their questions. This is one of the main reasons to pay attention to your website’s loading speed.
And still it’s not easy to evaluate exactly to what degree it affects SEO as Google has always been silent about its algorithms' details. We can only be certain that your WordPress website usability and overall user experience play a big role, especially on mobiles. Google also presented research indicating that 53% of mobile sites are dumped by the users completely if it takes longer than 3 seconds for them to be loaded.
How Site Speed Affects Conversion
If your website demonstrates any loading issues, you have a huge chance of losing potential buyers and as a result - sales. Disappointed users tend to be less likely to purchase again from the same store that loads slowly and it’s a huge loss of recurring visitors. And you should know that ecommerce sites rely a lot on returning visitors, as they form a crucial element of the Customer Lifetime, making up to 48% of all transactions according to Business Insider data.
So, investing in your website’s loading speed improvements, you are investing in your business’ successful future. No matter what your current revenues are, your WordPress site can grant you more whether you run a blog, a company website, or ecommerce store. By integrating the Best Practices we’ve mentioned above for enhancing and maintaining efficiency, you can boost your business faster and with less effort.
