People come to your website looking for answers.
The faster they can get to those answers, the happier they are with the experience they had on your website.
Google likes putting websites that give visitors good experiences at the top of their search results.
The higher you show up in the search results, the more traffic you get.
More traffic, more opportunities.
It’s important to get your website to load as fast as it can.
WebPageTest.org is one of the best places to determine how fast your site loads and what might be slowing it down.
There are 4 things that can slow a WordPress site down..
- Images
- Plugins
- Theme
- Server
Images
Most people upload an image, stick it on the page and they’re done.
But what they don’t know is that image needs to be resized, compressed and saved as a file type that keeps the file size small.
There are 2 file types that are used most often.
JPG and PNG
JPGs are good for images with lots of different colors like photographs.
PNGs are good for images with mostly solid or gradient colors and transparent backgrounds like logos or illustrations.
TinyPNG is a good site for compressing images before you upload them to your site.
Robin Image Optimizer is a plugin I use to optimize images that have already been uploaded.
Plugins
The next place I look for trouble is in the list of plugins.
Each plugin you have activated on your site is another chunk of code that has to be processed before a page can load.
Even plugins that are deactivated should be removed because you don’t want that plugin checking for updates constantly when you’re not even using it.
The fewer plugins you have, the better.
Theme
Most people shop around in the WordPress theme directory or on ThemeForest and pick whatever theme looks good.
This is fine, but could lead to trouble.
You don’t want a theme that loads a bunch of files for features that you’re not even using.
I like using the theme that comes with Beaver Builder, but others that are worth looking at are..
- GeneratePress
- Page Builder Framework
- Astra
- Kadence
Server
The last thing I look at is the server that your website is hosted on.
If it’s GoDaddy, please move whenever you get a chance.
They’re great with domain names, but not so great with hosting.
Anything owned by EIG is also not a good place to host your website. This would be hosts like Bluehost or Hostgator.
EIG is this big company that started buying up a bunch of web hosts and customers started having horrible experiences with their hosting and tech support.
Here’s an article if you want to read more about it..
https://www.reviewhell.com/blog/endurance-international-group-eig-hosting/
I currently recommend Siteground or Cloudways.