Give Your WordPress Website a Speed Boost

Did you know that internet users expect websites to load in less than 3 seconds? That’s all it takes to lose potential customers and clients and for visitors to decide if they want to stay on your website. The speed of a website and other has a significant impact on a business’s path to success. SMBs must ensure that their WordPress websites maintain speed and efficiency for visitors.

How Do I Check My Website Speed?

There are a variety of tools and software that you can use to measure the performance and speed of your WordPress website. Those tools offer a broader perspective on how well your website is doing. They provide essential information like:

  • Average load time
  • Website availability
  • Response time 
  • Website downtime 

All of these collectively tell you about the speed of your WordPress website. Some common tools for checking the speed of your website include; GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and WebPageTest. A website page that loads within 1-2 seconds is quick. Achieving this load time on an e-commerce website is even more significant as a 2018 Google statistic reveals that a website’s speed is directly related to its conversion rates.

Reasons Your WordPress Site Speed is Slow

Here are the potential reasons why your WordPress website load speed is so slow:

Bad Web Hosting. Your website plan can impact your WordPress website’s speed. Your web hosting package and provider can cost you valuable site visitors and a decrease in sales or subscribers. In most cases, the websites suffering from slow speed use shared hosting where only one server manages the traffic for many websites—affecting their speed.

Excessive External Links and Ads. Many businesses lose potential customers and visitors on their websites because they get preoccupied with making money through ads and external links. Ad marketing has its upsides, but too many of them can increase the load time of your WordPress website and push away visitors.

Absence of Caching Plugins. Caching issues can cause a WordPress website to perform poorly. Caching allows users to return to the same page quickly they left by storing their data and speeding up the load time. However, if your website doesn’t have a cache plugin, then load speeds can decrease.

Massive Image Files. The purpose of an image on a website is to grab a visitor’s attention or provide support to specific messages. But an image that isn’t optimized for web use can decrease the page load speed and slow down your website significantly. Large and unoptimized images can take a long time to load on a page.

Outdated Plugins. WordPress websites use several plugins for their optimal functioning and performance. But those plugins can double the website loading speed if they’re ignored and not regularly updated. Not having essential plugins or having too many of them can also slow down your website.  

How to Tell if a Website is Slow & Ways to Speed it Up 

Since conversion rates and revenue generation of e-commerce websites are closely related to website loading speed, you can quickly tell when your website is acting poorly and needs a boost. 

Here’s how you can boost the speed of your WordPress website: 

  • Invest in a dedicated host plan. A web host enables your website to appear on search engines, so instead of relying on a shared one, invest in a dedicated host plan. With many options for managed IT service providers and cloud services, SMBs can easily find a suitable and dedicated hosting plan. 
  • Optimize images with plugins. There are plenty of useful plugins for WordPress that help optimize images and decrease load time—double-check images before posting them on your website. Don’t assume they’re the correct size.  
  • Minimize CSS and Java length.  Shortening the  length of your CSS and Java files can significantly improve website speed. Yahoo observed a 9% increase in web traffic by lowering its load time by just 0.4 seconds. 
  • Install cache plugins. WordPress offers several plugins for caching that you can use to boost your website speed.
  • Simplify your WordPress themes. To speed up your website load time, keep your WordPress theme simple and light. Too many elements on your website page, like widgets, icons, images, and pop-ups, can expand the page size and increase the loading time for the viewers.

Why is Website Speed So Important?

How often have you hit the “back” button because the page isn’t loading fast enough? In this fast-paced world, website visitors have no patience for loading delays and web errors—especially if they’re ready to make a purchase. A slow website can push away potential customers, reduce sales and negatively affect conversion rates. 

According to a report by Aberdeen Strategy & Research, a 1-second delay in the load time of a site can lead to an 11% decrease in page views, a conversion rate decline of 7%, and a 16% reduction in customer satisfaction. Given these statistics, it is not hard to understand the importance of website speed for small- and medium-sized businesses.  

How Can My Managed IT Service Provider Help with My Website? 

A Managed IT Service Provider can help your website run smoothly by managing and optimizing your business network. They perform regular maintenance and updates for your system and reduce the potential risks affecting your website speed and performance. There’s no need for concern about your WordPress site being slow if you’ve invested in partnering with a reliable managed IT service provider to help run and manage your website.

 

Visual Edge IT, Inc. (VEIT) specializes in managed IT services and security, cloud computing, and print/copy solutions for businesses across the U.S. including remote office locations. We offer a full line of office technology and services including 24/7 remote monitoring and administration of networks, service desk, and data backup and restore to improve business processes across a variety of industries. Plus, Visual Edge IT™ represents the industry’s leading manufacturers of office technology allowing businesses to get equipment, supplies and service from a single source. Backed by more than 20-years of technology service and a national network of expert engineers, VEIT is uniquely positioned to support business technology needs. The company is headquartered in North Canton, OH, USA. Request your no-obligation assessment today and get a free dark web analysis.