WordPress Speed Optimisation - 4 Easy Steps To Speed Your Website Today!
One of the most important factors for SEO, User Experience and Sales is to keep your website optimised at all times. What does it mean?
Well, your website is mostly built using HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, MySQL and probably something else, and of course the content!
All of the above takes space and time to load, therefore, if your website has heaps of HTML, CSS, JavaScripts and massive database it may take a while to load your website.
This can be fixed by using a few Plugins and Techniques, let’s see what they are and what you can do for WordPress Speed Optimisation!
Before you start optimising your website:
- Back it up (UpdraftPlus Plugin or BackupBuddy)
- Run speed test so you can compare the speed before and after (https://gtmetrix.com/ and testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com)
Images Optimisation - Reducing Size - EWWW Image Optimizer
Most of the website owners may not even suspect what size of image/s they upload. From time to time I come across a website with a massive high-resolution images uploaded to the gallery or in a slider on Home page.
How do you think how long it will take to load 4MB image? From a smartphone with 4G connection maybe a few seconds, but what if you have 2 or 4 or more images?
It’s important:
- Resize images for your website to have the size just enough to look nice and don’t forget about an appropriate resolution (in most cases, you will be just fine with image, for full-width slider for example, with 1920px in width and height, well, depends on your requirements));
- Keep format for images in JPEG, unless you need a transparent background then choose PNG format – and of course, you need to compress images as well – use this free online service for compression of PNG and JPEG files;
Lazy Images Loading - a very useful plugin - A3 Lazy Load
You may have seen websites where when you start scrolling down you see the images just start appearing. That helps to load your home page quicker without needing to load all of the images you might have there.
The images will be loading at the same time when your visitor starts scrolling down.
Check it out – A3 Lazy Load
Caching - another must have plugin - W3 Total Cache
With W3 Total Cache you may achieve significant speed improvements.
NOTE! Make sure you have a backup of your website before installing and activating this plugin!
What this plugin does:
- CSS, HTML, JavaScript – minifying – reducing the size of these files;
- Reduced server response time;
- Enabling cache;
- Enabling Gzip compression – reduces the size of website files;
- and more…
Check it out – W3 Total Cache
Autoptimise - worth of having it!
This plugin works well with W3 Total Cache to optimise your website.
Just keep in mind that Autoptimize does minification as well, so you need to choose either enabling this feature on W3 Total Cache or on Autoptimize.
Check it out – Autoptimize
Lazy Images Loading - a very useful plugin - A3 Lazy Load
You may have seen websites where when you start scrolling down you see the images just start appearing. That helps to load your home page quicker without needing to load all of the images you might have there.
The images will be loading at the same time when your visitor starts scrolling down and this will help your WordPress Speed Optimisation.
Check it out – A3 Lazy Load
Conclusion
It’s very easy and free to do your WordPress speed optimisation, this will make it faster and more user-friendly. Website load speed is important SEO factor, and if your website is loading slow now you can fix it! If you need any help, please let me know, and I will be happy to assist!
Free Newsletter
An Email updates about Software, Online Tools, Marketing and more.
