Why is speed important?
When a potential visitor comes to your website, you only have a few seconds to grab their attention. If the website loads slowly, chances are the visitor will drop out. A slow website not only causes lost customers, but also lowers Google rankings because Google factors loading speed into its algorithm. Time to address this problem!
Ways to speed up your website
Lightweight theme
Choose a theme that contains no unnecessary features and performs quickly. Analyze themes with tools such as Google Pagespeed Insights. Lightweight themes provide a faster website without excess CSS and scripts. Contact us for recommendations.
Optimize image size
High-quality images can slow down the Web site. Use tools such as TinyPNG to compress images without losing quality. This significantly improves load times.
Caching plugins
Caching reduces loading time by storing data locally in the browser. This speeds up the reloading of a Web site. Plugins such as WP Rocket can help with this. However, our advice remains to optimize speed at the source, for example through our website speed optimization.
WordPress database cleanup
A tidy database improves the performance of your Web site. Remove unwanted data such as spam responses, revisions and unused accounts to avoid delays.
Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks cause unnecessary server requests. Disable this feature as it does not affect your backlinks, but it does make your website faster.
Lazy Load images
With Lazy Load, images are loaded only when they come into view. This significantly reduces loading time. Try tools such as Lazy Load by WP Rocket.
Minimizing JS and CSS
Use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to shrink CSS and JS files. This reduces the number of server requests and speeds up your Web site’s load time.
Finally
Improving the speed of your WordPress website offers many benefits, but make sure that optimizations don’t come at the expense of the user experience. Need help improving the speed of your website? Then get in touch with us.