How quickly your website loads on a users device is key to sealing a new client, new sale and new social followers. If your site takes along time to load it will have the complete opposite effect. In this article I will explain how to decrease your WordPress websites load speed so keep visitors on your web pages.
Load Speed Testing Tools
There are 2 testing tools I use to find out the load speed of a website. These 2 tools explain in detail everything I need to know about what are causing issues with each web page and which sections I need to address. These 2 tools are GTmetrix and Pingdom.
Identify The Issues
To start with open both of these websites, enter your full URL and click ‘Go’ or ‘Test Site’. These reports will take under a minute to produce your information.
The first thing you need to remember is its very rare you will get a perfect score. The load time that is an expectable load speed for all device is 2.0 seconds and under. The load times displayed on these reports is the total time your site takes to load from the initial request until its 100% completed. What you should be focused on is the load time the user sees, meaning the top half of your web page. When a visitor comes on your site they will only see the top half of your page first. This is what needs to load instantly; the remainder of your page can take that little bit longer.
WordPress Plugins To Fix Issues
There are a few WordPress Plugins to fix 90% of your load speed. If you have any difficulties installing or setting up these plugins you should use a website design company to correctly install website plugins as they may interfere with some aspects of your site.
WP Smush.it – reduces the file size of all your images to speed up load time.
W3 Total Cache – minifies JavaScript, clears cache for browsers, pages, objects and databases.
Additional Tips
The trick is not to have multiple plugins on your WordPress site, this will create more requests and slow the load speed. Keeping your pages and HTML code clean will decrease the amount of time your site takes to load.
.htaccess File
Adding the below code to your .htaccess file will increase the load speed for returning visitors.
<FilesMatch “.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf|webp|html)(.gz)?(?.*)?$”>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule .* – [E=CANONICAL:http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI},NE]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on
RewriteRule .* – [E=CANONICAL:https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI},NE]
Header set Link “<%{CANONICAL}e>; rel=”canonical””
Image Dimensions
Ensure your images have a height and width attribute that is the same size as your image displayed on your page. Here is an example! If the image displayed on a page is 700px wide and 400px high, the image file you upload should be 700px X 400px, not anything bigger or smaller.
Featured images:
- License: Image author owned
- License: Image author owned
This post is by Kev Massey from SixtyMarketing Derby. I Have been in the website design and internet marketing industry since 2002.