10 Easy Ways To Improve Your Site Speed

How fast is your site speed?

Do the pages load instantly, or is there a delay of a few seconds before all the content appears? When it comes to a successful website, every millisecond counts.

Consumers aren’t willing to wait around for the information they’re looking for; if your website is slow to load, your site visitors will be exiting and heading elsewhere before your home page even has a chance to wow them.

Not only that, but your site speed affects your ranking in search engine results: the faster it loads, the higher up it will be on Google.

Luckily, there are many ways you can tweak your website to improve site speed. Here are ten things you can action today.

10 Easy Ways To Improve Your Site Speed

1. Optimise Images

Those gorgeous photos you have on your site may look great, but they could be a drag on your site speed. If the picture files on your site are large, they’ll slow down your site.

The best practice when using any images on your website is to edit and resize them before uploading them to WordPress. You can then use an image optimisation plugin to further compress images and streamline your site. Try WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimizer.

2. Use Lazy Loading For Images

Lazy loading is especially useful for sites that are heavy on images or embedded video. Instead of attempting to download all your visual content at once, lazy loading only downloads what’s visible on your screen.

As you scroll down, the images that appear are downloaded one by one. This saves a lot of bandwidth and can increase site speed. There are plenty of plugins that simplify lazy loading for you.

3. Update Your WordPress Site Regularly

WordPress frequently releases updates to improve performance, fix bugs, and improve security. If you fail to update to the latest version, your site could become slow and unreliable, not to mention vulnerable to security issues and bugs.

4. Actively Manage Your Plugins

Plugins can do anything under the sun for your WordPress site, but they can also reduce your site speed in a variety of ways. If your plugins are outdated or conflicting with another, they can slow your site down.

Ensure all your active plugins are updated when new versions become available, and delete any you aren’t using. It’s also a good idea to check your site speed before and after installing a plugin to see if the benefits are worth any potential reduction in page speed.

5. Spring Clean Your Database

Your site can become littered with old, unused files that slow everything down. A good decluttering can make a world of difference. Plugins such as WP-Sweep or Advanced Database Cleaner help keep everything neat and tidy.

6. Avoid Uploading Audio Or Video Files To WordPress

Larger files like videos or audio take up a lot of space on your site and strain your resources, but that doesn’t mean you can’t include them on your site.

Instead of uploading them directly, use a video hosting service like YouTube or Vimeo to display the content on your WordPress site. You can do this by using WordPress’s built-in video embed feature.

7. Install A Caching Plugin

It’s likely that your website loads much faster for you on your computer than it does for first-time visitors on their devices. This is due to caching. Our devices store files when we visit different websites, helping them load faster on subsequent visits.

If you don’t have caching enabled, your visitors won’t be able to make use of this shortcut. According to WPbeginner, caching can make your WordPress site 2-5 times faster! Check that caching is enabled on your WordPress host, or use a caching plugin like WP Rocket or WP Super Cache.

8. Minify JS, HTML And CSS Files

This one may sound a bit technical, but it can make a huge difference to your site speed. JS, HTML and CSS files are involved in your website coding. These files can take up a lot of unnecessary space. Minifying them (reducing their size) helps speed up your site without affecting any of those essential building blocks. A free plugin such as WP-Optimize can take care of this for you.

9. Utilise GZIP Compression

GZIP compression creates smaller and lighter versions of your website files, making it easier and faster for your server to send them to users’ browsers. If you enable GZIP compression, your website will load much faster. A range of plugins can help you do just that, such as the WP-Optimize plugin mentioned above.

10. Use A Content Delivery Network

Did you know that your site may have different loading times in different parts of the world? The location of your web hosting server can impact site speed, depending on where users are located.

One way to avoid this variation in site speed is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare. A CDN is a network of servers around the world that store “static” files. When a user visits your site, they will receive these files from the server closest to them rather than your original host, speeding up your site speed.

Get Support To Improve Your Site Speed

While some site speed improving jobs are easy to tackle without developer experience, some are slightly more complicated. So, you might need some help to execute these strategies effectively.

Want to improve your site speed but don’t have the time or technical know-how to attend to all the nitty-gritty details? The Website Guardians can help. Our Ongoing Support Plans ensure your WordPress website is backed up, up to date and secure, but we also offer speed optimisation to get your site loading in the blink of an eye.