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Who doesn’t want to improve their website’s loading speed? This has been one of the hottest topics of discussion for a long time now. About always keeping your website page’s loading speed up to the mark. There are a plethora of benefits attached with faster loading pages.
This is not just about integrating any web plugin that you get and magically increase the loading speeds. And no ‘generic tips’ alone will help you increase the speed of your pages. What you need is a comprehensive guide to WordPress performance optimization.
And this article is just about that.
What is the big deal about loading speeds?
The fact is not hidden that the speed of your WordPress website directly impacts website conversion rates. Google itself has pressingly and consistently tied page speed with conversion rates. And the entire diaspora of the internet understands this.
Google says that 53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
They even trained their deep neural network which is a computer system modeled on the human brain and nervous system—with a large set of bounce and conversions data. The results were shocking. According to it, as page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.
This clearly indicates that no matter what, faster is better and less is more.
If you’re leveraging custom WordPress development services for your eCommerce related tasks, the conversion metrics of your website like the number of forms filled out, list of sign-ups, and incoming phone calls are generated through page forms. Giving you a clear picture of your sales funnel and conversion rates.
3 Most Important Aspects to Consider in your eCommerce Store Before Turning to Loading Speeds
SEO Ranking:- When it comes to ranking a website on search engines like Google, it uses a plethora of ranking factors when determining where to display your website in organic search rankings. Mobile loading speed stays as the most important of these factors. Google provides a bunch of tips and tools that helps website owners determine their mobile speeds.
Keeping aside the direct factors from any direct impact, page loading speeds can also be hurt by indirect factors, like slow loading speed leading to a higher bounce rate. For example when Google sees that users are leaving your website without interacting with it, it can hurt your rankings.
Google Ads Landing Page Scores:- These scores are taken into account at the time when Google compares your ad campaign with other campaigns vying to display their ads. The the loading times of your landing page are slow, this can lead to your ads not being shown as often or even not at all, and clicks costing more than they should.
Conversion Rates:- It is no secret that a speedy site invites a higher conversion rate. The formula is simple, do not impede your shoppers and remove as much friction as possible and you can expect a higher percentage of website visitors to make a purchase. This also give you a loyal customer who will come back and make recommendations to their network as a result of their overall experience on your website.
Why is your WordPress Website Slow?
Below are some of the most common issues that can cause your website to load slowly when compared to other eCommerce websites. You can definitely run some tests to know a full list of details and reasons (we will cover that later), While it’s best to look at the full details provided by a few major speed tests, majority of the test results will have these factors in common:
- Non-optimized images.
Never upload images on your WordPress site without optimizing them. This will make your site become a giant bandwidth hog. It is best to optimize your images with software like Adobe Photoshop or FastStone Photo Resizer before you upload them to your WordPress site. - Server response time.
Your WordPress hosting servers should always relay information as quickly as possible, if there is anything otherwise, it means that your site speed may be held hostage by a slow server. Always make sure that the servers on which you have uploaded your site have at least 99.9% uptime. They will battle through high traffic days like Black Friday. - WordPress Themes.
Even if you are using the best hosting and the most optimized images and content, it alone will not be able to make up for a third-party theme which has been poorly coded. Whenever possible, let your web developers create a theme for you using only what you need and how you need it. - Caching.
When the server renders a page on your website, it takes some amount of time. Caching your website primes these pages, allowing them to be rendered before a visitor access them. This is just like having a food item pre-cooked and well marinated. As soon as a user requests for it, you can simply serve it hot and fresh.
How to do WordPress Website Speed Test
It is imperative to analyze the current load time for your website. The speed may differ from page to page, as it depends on various factors. Some of these factors are:
- Size of the particular page you are testing
- The number of requests that page generates.
- Whether the page is cached or not.
- The kind of content, static or dynamic, the page hosts.
In the most common way, the homepage of a website is used as a benchmark to test the load time. In order to check the speed of a website, you can use a variety of these tools:
Here are the Best Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Website’s Loading Speed
- Select a good hosting provider:- Buy dedicated web servers for your website and choose a reputed provider
- Reduce Image Sizes:- Unrefined images can bloat your websites
- Use a Lightweight WordPress theme:- A heavy WP theme with too many elements and higher page sizes will make your web servers take a blow.
- Use a CDN:- CDN (Content Delivery Networks) help in keeping the site-loading speed to a minimum for visitors.
- Utilize Advanced Caching Techniques:- Combining plug-ins with advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish can help you better the loading speed of your website
- Cleanup WordPress Database:- Deleting unwanted data from your database will keep its size to a minimum.
- Enable GZIP Compression:- Compressing files on your local computer can save a lot of disk space.
- Keep External Scripts to Minimum:- The usage of external scripts on your web pages adds a big chunk of data to your total loading time.
Conclusion
One of the biggest advantages of mellowing down your website’s loading time is that it will help immensely in improving the experience of your visitors. This not only improves ranking on the SERPs, but also brings in a load of benefits for your website and business.
