In this section we’ll look at some easy to implement methods to greatly increase site speed.
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Website speed not only affects search engine rankings, but also sales.
One second of delay in site loading can lead to:
- 11% fewer page views
- a 16% drop in visitor satisfaction
- a 7% drop in conversions (source: Aberdeen Group)
Amazon observed similar trends reporting a 1% increase in revenue for every 100 milliseconds gained in site speed (source: Amazon).
Likewise Walmart, achieved a 2% increase in conversions for every second of speed improvement.
You’ve probably been seriously thinking about the above stats and are thinking about entering the record book for fastest ever.
The point is that a decent loading speed, under 5 seconds let’s say, is enough to both get your site to show up in the top Google results and sell. You don’t have to devote 80% of your resources to optimizing site speed now.
That’s why the optimization techniques below help you get rid of the biggest problems that affect load time. Once you’ve taken care of these main issues, you can dig deeper to optimize every bit of code.
But before you start the optimization process, check the actual speed of your site. You can use some free tools like Pingdom Tools, Google PageSpeed Insights, or GTMextrix. These also identify where your site is loading slower and offer suggestions for improvement.
How you can optimize your site for faster loading speed:
Optimize images for search engines
To optimise images for the Web you can open the image in Adobe Photoshop afterwards: File->Export->Save for Web.
Images saved for the web can be as much as 10 times smaller in size. Below, I’ve resized an image that originally took up 5MB, and then 200 KB.
Another option would be to use a plugin like WP-Smushit. The advantage of the plugin is that you can resize up to 50 images at once.
Use cache memory
When a visitor first arrives at your site, before they can use the page, their browser must download all the elements of the page – the HTML document, CSS stylesheets, Java files, images, etc.
Being quite a lot of components, the process takes time. Fortunately, we can make use of the browser’s memory, also called cache memory.
So when the user comes back, they don’t have to download all these files because they already have them stored in the browser, and the site will load much faster.
The easiest way to enable this option in WordPress is to install a plugin like WP Super Cache.
Reduce the number of active modules
If you have plugins you don’t use, uninstall or delete them.
To see which plugin is clogging up your site, you can disable plugins one at a time. If you deactivated a plugin and see an improvement using one of the above tools, it means that plugin was the culprit.
Another way to see which plugin is clogging up your site is to use a plugin like P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) which shows you exactly how many resources each plugin is consuming. Of course, once you have reduced the number of plugins, you can also delete this plugin.
Clean up the database
WordPress automatically saves everything. Because of this in the database it collects revisions of articles, pages, deleted comments, etc. which makes it difficult to load the site. To clear the database and increase the speed of the site you can use a plugin like WP Optimize to clean the database.
Don’t repeat CSS code
CSS defines the style of your site (font, colors, etc.). In general, your site accesses information in 2 ways: either through an external file that loads before the page displays, or inline, meaning that code is inserted into the HTML document of the page. The external CSS file is loaded into the HTML page header as follows:
link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”all” href=http://URL-ul-tău/style.css /
In general it’s better to use an external file because the code size is smaller (you don’t write CSS code on every line) and the risk of duplicate code is lower. As there is less code to read, the site loads faster.
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Chapter 1 – What is SEO – Chapter 2 – Optimization steps after creating a site – Chapter 3 – How to submit a site to search engines – Chapter 4 – How to optimize internal links – Chapter 5 – How to increase site speed – Chapter 6 – Keyword research – Chapter 7 – How to optimize title, keywords, URL and images – Chapter 8 – Off-Page optimization (Link building)
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