4 Crucial Tips to Optimize Your WordPress Site’s Speed
Slow-loading websites are a drag.
These days we can get access to nearly every type of information in the blink of an eye. We can communicate — either through text or video sessions or what-have-you — with people from any part of the globe in real-time.
The point?
People are now used to getting their quick fixes, and they’re likely to prefer people or things or places that don’t make them wait.
In fact, Amazon conducted a study showing that every second of delay makes them lose 1 percent of revenue. That’s a lot of money. However big or small your business is, chances are you’re bound to suffer significant losses too if it’s taking your WordPress site forever to load.
If you want to maximize your profits, you need to do whatever means necessary to optimize your WordPress site’s speed. Because as we’ve already established, every second counts.
So without further ado, here are the steps you need to follow to give your website the boost it needs to reel in those conversions.
1. Find out what’s causing your website to slow down
Just like in every major hospital operation, a proper diagnosis has to be made first. The same principle applies in speeding up your WordPress site. Before proceeding, a speed test and a diagnostic test are in order.
This is where Google PageSpeed Insights can come in very handy. It’s easy to use. Just go directly to the homepage, enter the URL of your website and click “Analyze.”
The page will then shortly take you to a detailed diagnostics report showing your page’s speed performance.
On top of obtaining key metrics that add more context about your site’s loading speed, the report also identifies the issues that are causing your website to slow down, along with “optimization suggestions” that will help you fix those issues yourself.
2. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
When it comes to speeding up the delivery of content on the internet, the importance of using a CDN, or content delivery network, can’t be emphasized enough.
But what is a content delivery network in the first place? To put it simply, a CDN is a network of servers located around the world designed to host your WP site’s static content.
Bear in mind that a CDN is different from your Wordpress hosting provider. What it does instead is house your website in all major regions.
For example, if your website is hosted in Los Angeles, a CDN can replicate your site and place it on a server in the Philippines. That way, all people in the Philippines can load your website in an instant.
(Source: Backup Run)
There are plenty of CDN providers out there to choose from. If you know next to nothing about CDNs, you’ll never go wrong with Incapsula.
3. Cache your website
Website caching is one of the most effective ways to give your WordPress website a boost in speed.
In case you’re curious, website caching refers to the temporary storing of files (such as HTML, images, etc.) which enables them to be processed quickly.
Now caching a WordPress website can be a complex and painstaking process, requiring you to mess around a bit with your website’s backend.
Fortunately, you can do away with all that by using a plugin like WP Super Cache, which allows you to go through the entire process with only a few clicks.
4. Set up Google AMP
Setting up Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages Project) in WordPress increases the loading times of your website on mobile devices.
Nearly everyone these days are glued to their mobile devices, which of course means that majority of your users are (or will be) visiting your website on their iPads or their phones or any other fancy mobile devices people are into these days.
In short, what Google AMP does is create a stripped down version of your URL. By using bare-minimum HTML and limited Javascript, Google AMP speeds up the rendering of your posts on mobile devices.
As an example, this is how Time.com appears when loaded on a desktop.
And below is a screenshot showing an AMPed version of the popular news site when rendered on a mobile device.
Just by looking at the examples above, it’s easy to see why AMP posts load much faster than their desktop versions.
We’ve already mentioned that faster loading times translate to more conversions and therefore more revenue, right?
Well, Slate recently put that to the test. According to Google, Slate registered a 44 percent increase in monthly unique visitors and a 73 percent increase in visits per monthly unique visitor.
There are other major advantages of setting up Google AMP on your WordPress site. They are the following:
- It’s free and open source
- Better placements in SERPs
- Offers advertising opportunities (more AdSense revenue)
- Automatically optimizes images
- Prevents large CSS and JS frameworks
How to setup Google AMP in WordPress
Setting up Google AMP used to be rocket science. But thanks to the release of dedicated AMP plugins over the last several months, you don’t have to bend over backward to make your site AMP-friendly.
AMP for WordPress by Automattic is one of the most recommended AMP plugins out there. To install the plugin, just go to your WordPress dashboard and search for it under “Add New” plugins.
Once activated, you will see the words “AMP: Enabled” under the “Publish” section on the upper right portion of your WordPress dashboard.
You’re also free to modify the appearance of your AMPed web page by going to “Appearance” on the left-hand panel of the dashboard and clicking on “AMP”.
Essentially, what AMP for WordPress (and other AMP plugins for that matter) does is assign a different URL for the mobile version of your WP post. AMPed posts are typically appended with /amp or /?amp.
Original Blog Post URL: https://example.com/blog-post
AMP Blog Post URL: https://example.com/blog-post/amp/
Final Word
The tips mentioned in this post will go a long way to boosting your WordPress site’s speed. Implement all of them and you can bet your bottom dollar that your visitors will be more inclined to stay. Better yet, they’ll keep coming back.
Of course, that can only mean increased organic traffic and a better return on your investment. It’s clearly a win-win situation for both you and your target audience.
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