Do you know over 40% of the web worldwide is powered by WordPress? It’s true. Also, it is interesting to know that according to some studies conducted from 2000 to 2016, the average attention span of a human has decreased from 12 seconds to mere 7 seconds. It is a big thing for website owners because they now have very little time to impress their visitors within 7 seconds, or else the visitors will leave their website. If you are a WordPress website owner, then it is clear to you by now that you need to improve your website’s loading speed to drive more traffic which will eventually increase your revenue.
With this article, we will discuss the factors affecting your website’s loading time and the tips on improving your website’s loading time.
Factors Affecting The Loading Speed Of A WordPress Website
Have you ever wondered, what is the ideal time for a website to load? If not, then it’s under 2 seconds. All Google recommended page loading times in under 2 seconds, and if you can make your website’s loading time between 1-2 seconds, it shows a definite increase in your visitor percentage. But, to achieve this number, you need to know what slows down your website’s loading time.
There are numerous reasons why your website is taking too long to load. But most prominent reasons are:
- Your choice of web hosting service affects your website’s performance. If your WordPress hosting server is not properly configured, then your website will take longer to load.
- Uploading images and videos on websites attract visitors. But this also might affect your website’s loading time; if you upload larger sized images and videos then, this might significantly increase your website’s loading time.
- WordPress provides a wide range of plugins and widgets for customization options. If the WordPress plugins and widgets are not properly configured or you are installing poorly coded plugins, it will slow down your website.
- Modern browsers like Chrome, Edge, etc., store frequently visited websites in cache for faster loading. If your WordPress website does not serve cached pages, it might overload your server, and you will slow down your website.
How Can You Improve Your WordPress Website’s Loading Time?
Now that we have discussed the important factors that slow down your website’s loading time, you should know how you can improve the loading time of your WordPress website.
1. Good Web Hosting Service Provider
As we discussed in the previous part, web hosting services can affect your website’s loading speed in a good or bad way. There are various good web hosting service providers who came up with multiple innovative ways to improve your website’s performance. Over the years, web hosting companies have improved their technologies and also decreased their service prices.
2. Installation Of WordPress Caching Plugins
Optimizing your WordPress website is very important to make your website load faster. If multiple visitors visit your website simultaneously, it will slow down your website, and a WordPress Caching Plugin will help you make your website faster. Like the browsers, this caching plugin makes a copy of your web page on its first load, and for next subsequent users, it uses the cached version of the web page. This will increase your website’s performance by 2 to 5 times faster.
Here are some WordPress Caching Plugins that will make your website faster and more optimized:
- W3 Total Cache
With an easy-to-use interface, W3 Total Cache is one of the best caching plugins, which improves your website’s SEO performance. It also increases the performance of your WordPress website by making its load time faster than your competitors. This plugin is free to use, but its paid version will make your website load more quickly; by using the W3 Total Cache Coupons, you can get additional discounts on the paid plan.
- WP Rocket
WP Rocket is considered the most powerful web performance plugin available in the market. You don’t need any coding knowledge to use this plugin; it automatically applies numerous web performance practices, which will instantly improve your website performance. Although its paid plans are affordable, WP Rocket Coupons will make them more affordable by providing multiple coupon codes.
- Perfmatters
Most WordPress plugins come with bloatware and are not lightweight, making your WordPress website slower to load. Perfmatters is a very lightweight plugin that reduces HTTP requests to increase the performance of your website. This plugin comes with three paid plans which are billed annually; you can go through the Perfmatters Discount Codes to get additional discounts on your preferred plan.
- WP Super Cache
One of the most popular WordPress plugins, WP Super Cache, improves your website performance by creating static html files from dynamic blogs. This process makes it easier for the webserver to serve multiple users simultaneously. This WordPress plugin serves cache files in 3 ways - Expert, Simple, and WP-Cache caching.
- WP Super Minify
The open-source WordPress plugin WP Super Minify helps speed up your website’s loading process by combining minifies and caches inline CSS and JavaScript files. It compresses the source files of HTML, inline JavaScript and CSS.
3. Lightweight WordPress Themes
WordPress supports a wide variety of themes that will make your website more attractive and eye-pleasing. But using too many themes will make your website slower and laggy. To avoid this issue, you should always opt for lightweight WordPress themes available in WordPress’s theme store. Most of these themes are free to use and come with multiple functionalities.
4. Optimize Image Sizes
As discussed above, uploading large-sized images will make your website slow. To avoid this, you need to optimize the image size manually. You can do this by using online tools or photoshop. There are various image optimization plugins available in WordPress which will reduce your time in optimizing the images.
Conclusion
Every website owner wants to increase their revenue by driving more traffic, but they miss one most important thing: making their website’s loading time faster. Website’s loading time makes a great impact on the viewership of your website. Other than the points we discussed above, there are much more effective ways to improve your website’s performance. It is always advisable to research deeply about different ways to optimize your website performance on a regular basis.