You have just created a website, but you don’t understand why it is so slow, why it takes so long to load, and this disrupts your communication and keeps your business from growing. But relax and read this article to the end! We’ll share five tips that will help you boost your website speed.
What is website speed?
A website’s speed is mainly observed through how fast its pages load. This speed is expressed in seconds and greatly affects the impact the site will have on the visitor. If the site takes a long time to load, visitors will be tempted to leave and look for the information elsewhere, and that will make you lose traffic.
Now that we’ve defined what website speed is (loading speed, for those still not following), how can we measure it?
How do you check a website’s speed?
To check a website’s speed, the easiest way is to use free tools such as Pingdom, GT Metrix or Google PageSpeed Insights.
For example, the result of the MboaGeek website test on GT Metrix is as follows:
In this test, you can see information such as the site speed (91/100), the site’s score according to the YSlow index (a set of rules defined by Yahoo that determine a website’s performance), the page load time (3.2s), the number of requests (55) and the page size (1.17MB).
1- Use a caching system
A web caching system is a system that keeps copies of files used on a website in order to answer later requests faster by using these copies without going through the web server.
On WordPress, there are several caching plugins that speed up your website by storing static HTML files of your site to load when your users request a page from your website.
Without caching, your website will take time to process the WordPress PHP files and access your database to generate the HTML pages for your users.
The most used caching plugins on WordPress are the following:
2- Optimize the size of your images
Large images can dramatically increase your website’s load times, but they are very easy to optimize.
The best way to optimize your images is to compress them using photo-editing software such as Photoshop before putting them online. By optimizing your images before uploading them, they’ll already be at the right pixel size with small file sizes.
You can also optimize your images on the fly by adding an image-optimization plugin on WordPress. These plugins let you automatically optimize your images when you upload them to WordPress and bulk-optimize all the images that have already been uploaded. The WordPress image-optimization plugins and online tools we recommend are:
3- Change your hosting service
Having good-quality hosting is crucial for your website to load quickly. The hosting company and the type of hosting plan you choose will depend on your website and the amount of traffic it generates. The more traffic there is, the more bandwidth it will need.
There are a great many hosts available, and in Cameroon you can find good hosting from our partner Mboahost and on Kalawebs.
This site is hosted with Mboahost and I have always been satisfied with the quality of the servers and the live support system by phone and email whenever there are questions or problems.
4- Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN, or content delivery network, such as Cloudflare will speed up your website by placing copies of your site on many servers around the world so that they are physically closer to your users when they access your website.
Many hosts will have a simple one-click activation in your cPanel, so it’s very easy to enable your website on a CDN.
When you use a CDN, remember to enable developer mode when you make changes to your website so that you can actually see the changes you make. Developer mode will disable Cloudflare for 3 hours and re-enable it automatically if you forget.
5- Manage your plugins better
Plugins are extra pieces of code that you can add to your website to enable, well, almost any feature you can think of.
The problem is that installing a plugin on your site will inevitably impact load time, especially if it involves additional processing in the back-end. But by using tools such as Plugin Organizer (which is available for WordPress), you can specify the load order of plugins, and you can also select the active plugins for each specific page or post.
This means that plugins will only be loaded when needed, improving loading speeds in the process.
Each of these five tips can, on its own, speed up your website’s loading. Combined, they can considerably speed up your site’s load time. In a world where visitors can be put off (or worse, irritated) by a one-second wait, it’s important for businesses to do everything in their power to keep their sites fast and efficient.
Are you worried about your website’s load time? Have you done anything to speed it up? If so, what have you found that works? Let me know with a comment!