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Published July 11th, 2017 by

Making WordPress faster

Helping you Make Your WordPress website Even Faster

There are many quality WordPress web hosts available, that put performance before profit. Once you find one, you will realise that there is no need to compromise on your website speed as it is part and parcel of what they do, it’s not a “chargeable optional extra”.

Understanding why achieving a faster page load time (actual page speed) is hugely important:

  • First, to keep users on your site they need to have the page load as quickly as possible. A long wait time can be dangerous as visitors can give up and click away (higher bounce rates), meaning that you’ve lost an interested visitor, that you have no doubt worked hard to get to your site in the first place.
  • Second, these circumstances raise the bounce rate and give your web site poor statistics.
  • And possibly, most importantly, the amount of time a user spends on a page will be minimal and their return rate will also be low.

However, by gaining a better understanding of how web pages work, it’s easy to adjust a website to increase its performance. This means more than just reducing the bytes on a page.

Google provides a tool known as PageSpeed Insights to help you test the general compliance of your WordPress web pages and help you identify what needs to be done to improve them. A scoring system analyses the page performance and so it’s become custom for everyone with a website to want to achieve the perfect score of 100/100.  Just always keep in mind, these are scores and not relevant to actual page load time, they are just indicators to help you understand what you can do to improve.  Other tools such as GT Metrix and Pingdom also test the actual page loading time and you have a choice of server locations, so can pick the one closest to your target audience.

Here are 3 key things to consider when starting on the “improving your page speed” journey:

  1. Latency Can Hurt
    At first, it seems obvious that the fewer bytes on a web page, the fewer a user will need to load and so the page speed will be quicker. That leads you to do all of the things possible to minimise the bytes, compressing everything in sight. While this helps, it’s not everything when it comes to page speed. For many, they will optimise their websites completely and then wonder why their site is still slow. This is because there is more to the process of loading a page than presenting the content. It takes time for these processes to reach a server and then the server must respond. When a user visits a web page, a request is sent causing lots of processes. The final part of which is presenting the content. Therefore, it’s only a bit of the page speed that is affected by the size of the content (within reason, so adding a 10MB image will cause a massive issue to your page load as the bandwidth that your users are accessing the site from is the slowest factor in most cases). Requests involve finding the server and connecting to it, waiting for a response and then receiving it, and it’s important to recognise that these steps take time. A fast hosting server response time will help massively overall as it reduces all these initial requests loading time. You can test your server response (TTFB) with https://performance.sucuri.net/
  2. Bring your data closer to your users.
    Unfortunately, network signals are limited in speed and there will always be some data to transfer. The data is the suitcase for the signals that are travelling; they weigh it down. While making them as light as possible will help, they will always weigh something. The solution? CDNs. Content Delivery Networks make servers geographically closer to users to reduce the waiting time between request. That way the network, even with its suitcase, has a shorter distance to travel and will, therefore, reach its destination faster. It’s the only real way to reduce the requests that are sent and received involving the server and the best solution to this problem. PageSpeed scores are complicated because they are affected by the physical distance between a user and their nearest server. Luckily, this can work in your favour by properly planning your hosting infrastructure. Cloudflare is a great example of an all-encompassing solution.
  3. Set A Realistic Goal and Prioritise
    Loading a web page often involves many requests, not just the one. This happens when the URL corresponds and the browser discovers there are more resources needed and launches a lot of other processes. Sometimes these include CSS, JavaScript, font files and more. No matter what, they involve individual requests and response times, meaning they can add up and cause a low page speed. Being realistic means not necessarily aiming for the perfect score, but one that is satisfactory for both you and your visitors. Prioritise both latency and compression for the ultimate results and have faith in the fact that once a server has been found, the browser will not need to search for it again provided your host has a good backend caching system in place. Cache is everyone’s friend, but only to be used as the last stage of your WordPress Hosting  By making cache the final step, you ensure that everything else is as good as possible before you get to this point.  Adding the cache as the first step leaves too many factors for bad hosts to ignore.

Other things to keep in mind when undergoing your WordPress speedup – Image compression is important, optimising images can sometimes be the single most important thing you can do, big images, take long to load, especially on mobile connections.  Plenty of tools exist to help reduce image size. A well-optimised Database not only helps keep everything running smoothly but can also have a direct bearing on your page load times because it’s easier to find the information.

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