How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site: In-Depth Guide

It would be best if you considered the speed at which your WordPress website loads as one of the most important factors when building a successful one. In addition to improving conversion rates, which leads to more significant sales, site speed is one of Google's and other search engines' ranking signals. You won't be able to make more money if your site is slow. This guide will show you how to speed up your WordPress website so your visitors have a great experience with your business.

Why is the speed of your WordPress Site Important?

There are many reasons for speed, but the three most important are visitor experience, search engine optimization, and conversion rate. Let's examine each one.



Visitor Experience

It is common knowledge that waiting for a page to load is a pain, especially since so many websites can load pages in under a second. According to Google, a long load time will cause 53% of visitors to leave a website. Poor design choices can cause the page to load slowly and fail to load correctly, which guarantees a visitor will never return.



Search Engines

It has been widely stated that website speed is one of the factors that search engines consider when ranking your site. Search engines are supposed to help users find websites that provide the information they are seeking quickly. Speed can drastically impact that experience, as we just discussed. Thus, search engines prioritize rankings for faster sites as a top priority.



Conversion Rates

In retail sites, a 0.1-second improvement can increase conversion rates by 8.4%. Every millisecond counts when a shopper considers making a purchase. Online stores place a high value on speed. It also means shoppers can load more product pages, making their shopping cart more likely to fill up. Simply put, speed leads to more sales.

How to Check Your WordPress Website Speed?

Page load times should be under 2 seconds. However, the faster they can be, the better. a few milliseconds of improvements here and there can save you half a second or even a full second. First and foremost, you need to analyze the loading time of your website. It is important to note that this speed varies from page to page, as it is affected by a variety of factors, including the size of the page, the number of requests it generates, whether it is cached or not, and finally, the type of content it hosts. There are three tools widely used to check the speed of a website:



Google PageSpeed Insights

A powerful tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights can help you identify major flaws that are slowing down your load times. In fact, it is the best place to start when you're trying to figure out what needs to be improved. The tool provides a score and highlights problem areas on your website. Among them are minifying CSS, JS, and HTML. However, it does not give you a specific speed.



GTMetrix

You can run GTMetrix as a free optimization plugin from within your website. It shows two separate scores, one from Google PageSpeed Insights and one from YSlow, a metric that GTMetrix uses to analyze mobile performance. It's great to get two reference points on your website without leaving it. By comparing the data, you can identify problem areas and fix them.



WebPageTest

A free tool like WebPageTest allows you to test your page speed in real-time. It identifies which factors are affecting your speed. It also provides separate scores for security, first-byte time, and other factors. And yes, this tool tells you the exact amount of time it takes to load a page down to the millisecond, so it's convenient.

How to Speed up WordPress sites

You can speed up WordPress sites by following these 7 steps:

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