A fast website will not only help with a good user experience but also help your SEO!
A faster website can lower bounce rates and increase conversion rates on your website!
What affects Your website speed?
There are many reasons your website may not be up to speed, including the number of resources your website needs to load, the server it is hosted on, images uploaded, and much more.
A website’s performance can change from month to month, due to servers, updated (or not updated) plugins, and many other factors. Therefore, it is important to periodically check your website’s performance.
Tools such as gtmetrix will give you insight into how your website is performing.
6 Ways To Increase Website Speed & Performance
1. Choose a good hosting provider
Where your website is hosted directly impacts website speed and page loading times! therefore it is very important you choose wisely!
If you have a website with a large amount of traffic on daily basis, it is worth paying extra to have dedicated hosting services.
For most websites, I recommend Siteground as a hosting provider, their platform offers an all-in-one performance solution, with a premium (Google Cloud) infrastructure and a speed-optimised server setup, and they also offer tons of performance tools out-of-the-box.
2. Build & Maintain The Site Effectively
There are many optimal ways when building your site to help with its speed, lets’s look 3 main areas.
Your Website theme
When choosing a theme, you want to ensure you choose one that has the features you need but also is of high quality. Choosing a multi-purpose, lightweight themes such as Hello theme or Astra is a good start, both these themes can be customised to fit most sites. The theme is your site foundation and therefore plays a big role in how fast your site will load.
Once your site is built is important to keep your theme up to date.
Your Website Plugins
Plugins can have a direct impact on your speed and load times, (depending on size, code quality, and files to load) they can havea huge part to play when it comes to your site’s speed.
When using plugins ensure you choose ones good quality, only use what you need, keep your plugins up to date, and delete plugins you aren’t using.
External scripts you use on your website
External scripts are great for websites, adding a lot of useful features – videos, analytics, and much more. But they can considerably slow down your page loading time!
External scripts include Google analytics, google maps, Facebook share count, embedding ads, social media embeds, fonts etc
Remember only to use scripts that are important to your website goals, if they are important, there are a number of ways to help reduce the impact on your performance such as lazy loading and delaying loading of 3rd party scripts. This can be achieved through various plugins.
3. Optimise Images
Images can be one major factor in a slow website, but they are essential to every website. Therefore, it’s very important to ensure they are fully optimised.
To optimise your images, you should use images that are the proper size before uploading, use an optimising plugin and enable lazy load.
4. Caching
Caching is a powerful hosting technology to boost performance! you can have caching through a plugin or on server level (with your host). At SiteGround you get the most potent cache package for free in all plans: static caching + full-page caching + Memcached that all together can speed up your websites up to 5 times!
5. Optimise Code
Plugins can help you can minimise, combine and delay code to increase your website speed. But remember sometimes carrying this out can break the front end of your website, so it is important when doing this to test your website
Minifying your CSS and JavaScript files means that all the unnecessary data from them like double spaces, empty new lines, comments, etc. will be removed from the files lowering their size. This makes the amount of data that needs to be transferred to the visitors’ browsers less and thus making the website load faster.
Combining CSS and JS files will reduce the requests made to your website and thus improve its loading speed. You can use the SiteGround Optimizer to combine these assets. The plugin will keep the scripts and styles in their original location after the combination for the best compatibility with other plugins.
6. CDN
Using CDN speeds up your page loading for your international traffic. You can subscribe for a third-party provider, or you can with your web host. SiteGround offer in-house built (free) CDN, which unlike third-party solutions requires no configuration and can be enabled
Are You Ready To Optimise your website?
Above are 6 actionable tips to speed up your website. A fast-loading website is ideal, and requires you to maintain and test your website regularly as factors contributing to the performance of your website change!
Remember to
- Take regular backups of your site, especially before updates and changes
- Optimise images before uploading to the site!
- Test performance on 3rd party tools (best checked in incognito browser)
- Test your site after updates to ensure any of the above techniques haven’t impacted your website
Would you like actionable tips for your website straight to your inbox?
Sign up to my email tips for your WordPress website, these will include performance, design, SEO and much more
*** Please note Siteground links in this article are affiliate links
