Why Website Speed is Important
Site speed is an essential ingredient to a successful website. It often goes unnoticed when it works well, but it is painfully obvious when it doesn’t.
Visitors will “bounce” (aka leave) a website with slow page load times. Likewise, Google and other popular search engines use site speed as a factor for their search rankings (both for mobile and desktop). The faster the website, the better your chance of a higher ranking.
Even if your website is slow now, we have a few tips you can use to speed up your WordPress site.
Not a WordPress user? Check out: How to Speed Up Your Website.
Is Your Site Slow?
Not sure if your website is slow? Google offers a free tool called PageSpeed Insights that lets you know how quickly your website loads (and where it could improve).
To assess your site speed, go to the PageSpeed Insights page, enter your website’s URL in the text box, and click the Analyze button. Be sure to look at both the mobile and desktop versions to see how your website performs.
Once analyzed, PageSpeed Insights may also provide you with diagnostic information to help you troubleshoot any issues that are slowing down your website.
This is a great place to start for those who need help determining where their website stands!
Test your site here: Page Speed Insights
Increasing Website Speed
Once you know how your website is performing, you can use the tips below to optimize your website (and increase your website speed!).
Get Rid of Extra Plugins
WordPress plugins are easy to add and implement, which is one of the reasons for WordPress’s popularity. However, it’s also easy to fill a WordPress site with unused plugins, which can affect your website’s performance.
To give your site a little boost, completely remove any unused plugins.
Tip: Deactivate and uninstall a plugin. Unfortunately, deactivated plugins that aren’t uninstalled can still slow your website down.
Optimize Your Images
Images can transform a website from “just good” to “GREAT!” However, images can also slow a website down if they’re not properly optimized. So, how do you optimize your images? We’ll show you.
Image Dimensions
Image dimensions may not seem problematic since many themes resize images to fit the webpage’s needs. However, that means that the site is doing extra work resizing images each time a visitor lands on your site. Multiply that by each image, and you have a decent chunk of your server resources dedicated to loading images.
To avoid that extra resource issue, resize your images to the exact image dimensions your website uses. Doing so saves your website the effort of resizing them every time it loads, allowing the server to focus its resources elsewhere.
You can change your image dimensions in most image editors or directly in the WordPress media editor.
Compress Your Images
Compression can reduce your file size, especially if your site uses high-quality images.
Compression reduces the image’s file size, thus reducing the amount of loading work your server needs to do. The less work your server needs to do, the faster your website pages load.
There are two main categories of image compression: “lossy” and “lossless.”
Lossy compression can drastically reduce the image’s file size but may also reduce the image quality. On the other hand, lossless compression retains the original image quality while cutting down on the file size. Consider which method of compression would work best for your site.
There are many image compression tools out there, like tinypng.com or compressor.io. Simply upload your image and download the compressed version.
Choose Themes Wisely
The WordPress theme you choose can significantly impact your site speed. A well-designed theme keeps speed in mind and implements design choices to keep the website loading quickly. No amount of image compression or plugin trimming will fix a poorly designed site.
This also applies to old themes. New standards and practices are coming out daily, meaning that websites must adapt to keep up with the rest of the internet. If your website theme is ten years old and has not been updated recently, it might be time to start searching for a new one.
Some things can slow an optimized theme down, like large image files, but fixing those issues will return your website to full speed. However, slowness may be a permanent fixture if your theme doesn’t prioritize speed, is outdated, or poorly designed. Swapping to a different theme is the only way to fix such a site.
Choosing a well-designed theme from the beginning can save you time and effort later. Your theme is the base of your website. You wouldn’t choose unstable materials to build a house on, so why would you choose a slow theme?
Use WordPress Caching
Website caching is another way you can speed up your site. Caching works like this: the server stores a copy of your website and every time a visitor lands on the page, it feeds them the pre-stored version of the website. This means the server doesn’t need to reload the site every time a visitor lands, thus reducing the load time. This can boost your site speed, especially if you use many plugins or a complex theme.
Pair Networks’ Managed WordPress packages and PairSIM WordPress installation come with plugins to enable caching, allowing our customers to reap caching’s benefits immediately.
Clean Your WordPress Database
WordPress is built on databases. While the average user doesn’t need to access the WordPress database, the database is critical to a WordPress site’s infrastructure. It holds all the data for your website and makes sure it’s available for the website to use when needed. Without a database, you couldn’t store your posts, pages, pictures, and more with WordPress.
However, if your WordPress website has been around for a while, it’s probably built up junk in its database. This is especially true if you often create, delete, and move posts and pages around. Databases store important things, of course, but they also keep less important things like post revisions and spam comments. So, whenever you update a post/page or fix a typo, your database stores a copy. If you receive hundreds of spam comments, the database keeps that, too.
All these things have their uses – so it’s nice that the database stores them. However, over time, this data build-up can begin slowing down your database (and, by extension, your website). If your website has been around for a while, you may not need some of the information it stores – like post revisions from years ago.
Luckily, you can get all the gunk out of your WordPress database by optimizing it! Optimizing your database removes some of the unnecessary data that it’s storing. Doing this every once in a while is a great way to rejuvenate your site speed. It’s like spring cleaning – but easier!
The developers of the popular UpDraftPlus plugin have a great plugin for optimizing your database. And as a bonus, it can help optimize your images, too.
Check it out here: WP Optimize
Healthy Site = Faster Site
Did you know that a slow site can be a symptom of malware? Malware, or malicious software, is designed to disrupt, infect, and steal. If your website becomes infected with malware, it can be a major headache for your online presence.
To protect yourself (and your site speed), we recommend implementing good security practices to mitigate the risk. At Pair, we offer free malware scanning with all of our hosting packages, plus an upgraded Intrusion Defense package for those who want comprehensive website protection.
Need Help? Contact Our Support!
Need help implementing any of these tips? Contact our Pair Support team! We’re available 24/7, every day of the year, to help you get the most out of your website.