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A Breakdown of the Ultimate Guide to Faster WordPress Speeds
A WordPress (WP) website is one of the most effective tools you will need for your internet marketing strategy. With over 3.26 billion people now using the internet, it goes without saying that your brand needs some form of online presence. Over 79% of Americans for instance are now shopping online and if your brand is not visible on this platform, then it simply doesn’t exist.
Harnessing the Power of WP CMS
A WordPress business website gives you an upper hand in your niche for various reasons. 75 million websites depend on WP content management system (CMS) while 22% of newly registered domains in the U.S run on WP CMS. In addition, 48% of Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs use WordPress. There are many other reasons why you should be using a WP website or blog including ease of installation, ease of administration, customization, thousands of free plugins for better functionality, and scalability among others.
Why Speed for Your WP Website Matters
While a WP blog or site gives you ahead start in online marketing, there is still a lot of work to do to stay ahead. One of the most important factors of success in search engine optimization (SEO) is the loading speeds. Even the world’s best CMS has to grapple with loading speeds as your site grows and more information ends up in the database.
Your site’s loading speed greatly impacts on the user experience and expectations.39% of people stop engaging with a website if the images can’t load or they are slow in doing so. 51% of shoppers have cited slow speeds as the reason they have abandoned a website. Strange Loop case study that involved Amazon and Google found that a 1-second delay in page load time leads to 75% reduction in conversions, 11% fewer page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
It goes without saying that you have to optimize your WP site for better performance in terms of speed. Here is a simple breakdown of the ultimate guide to faster WordPress speeds which is a good place to start your SEO campaign:
- Find out your WP site’s loading speeds and the problem areas to build a strategy.
- Use lazy load plugins such as Lazy Load, BJ Lazy Load, jQuery Image Lazy Load WP and Image Lazy Load (Unveil.js)to make your site’s content more manageable as images don’t load at once.
- Optimize images – Use photo-editing tools to optimize images for your site or other web-based tools. This reduces loading speeds.
- Optimize WP database – Minimize number of revisions by editing your wp-config.php or using plugins.
- Avoid excessive use of plugins – Yes, your site needs plugins, but excessive use of these tools will slow down the site due to the coding and scripts of every plugin.
- Choose a lightweight framework/theme –The guiding principle when doing this should be simplicity and speed.
- Stop hot linking – This popular practice is seemingly harmless but actually exhausts your web hosting resources as your server works to load images on the other sites.
It is also advisable to turn off pingbacks and trackbacks, minify JavaScript and CSS files, optimize web font, enable compression, minimize unnecessary HTTP requests, use a content delivery network (CDN) and find a reliable web hosting serve that is able to keep up with your growing needs.
