Do you want to optimize your site speed? We’ve put together a comprehensive guide to WordPress speed optimization. You’ll have access to some helpful information, such as why speed is important, what may slow down your WordPress site, and actionable steps that you can take to make your website faster immediately. You may even have just migrated your website from another CMS, such as Squarespace, to WordPress, and you’re looking to better understand how to make your website stand out.
Remember that the consumer is spoiled for choice. As such, when search engines are ranking results, they want to ensure that they’re only showing the best of the best to their users. This is why your site speed and performance matter so much – it’s part of the difference between showing up on the first page of Google and showing up on the tenth.
In this article, we’ll delve into some WordPress performance optimization best practices and answer both of the questions: What are the top tips to improve WordPress website speed? And Why is your WordPress site slow? Remember that improving performance helps to fix one of the most crucial WordPress issues.
Let’s dive in.
Why Does Page Speed Matter?
Evaluating the page speed is crucial if you want to know the health of your WordPress site. No one likes a slow website (and neither does Google!). If you focus on providing a faster and safer experience to the users, you’ll benefit from the Google Page Experience update. And there’s more.
Website speed influences SEO. Google has indicated that the speed at which your page loads is an important signal in determining its ranking. Google wants to know that if they send a visitor your way, that visitor will be happy with the experience. Google includes the Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. The Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage’s overall user experience: the loading speed will become more crucial than ever. There are three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint.
Fast sites are easier to crawl. In addition, when your page is slow, it disincentivizes web crawlers which only have limited resources and might deprioritize your site if it is too slow.
Website performance impacts conversions. Optimizing your website loading time is also relevant from a user experience perspective – a slow site just doesn’t cut it these days. You have a very short window of time to keep users’ attention. If there is any delay or whatsoever, people are likely to click away to something else. Regardless of the type of business you have, size, or kind, ensuring that your page loads as fast as possible is a necessary part of any online strategy. The quicker a webpage loads, the more likely a user is to perform the targeted action on that webpage. And we all agree with that!
Fast sites reduce the bounce rate. One of your marketing goals should always be faster than your competitors simply because they are just one click away. You can have the best content and a great product, but if your website is slow, you’ll lose all the efforts you put into design and development. Don’t be that website!
As you can see, speed matters, and we recommend you always test your website speed. The best tools available to audit your WordPress performance and measure your Core Web Vitals are the following:
The million-dollar question is… how do you speed up your WordPress site?
There are several performance optimization best practices that you can put in place today to reduce page load time and make your WordPress site load faster. Here’s our complete list of actionable recommendations, from easy to advanced.
You can watch the video about the 9 easy ways to speed up your site or keep reading and discovering them all, including the WordPress performance optimization techniques that are part of the WordPress pre-launch checklist you should consider for your projects.
3 Basic Speed Optimization Steps (The Low Hanging Fruit With No Coding Required)
