How to Increase Your Site Speed

Your website speed refers to how quickly your site load when an internet user visits your site. If you’re just setting up your site newly, you may not worry about your website speed since it is relatively new. Everything works well, the design looks beautiful and the pages load fast. As time goes on, however,  it may start to wear off if you don’t maintain your site properly.

According to research, the longer it takes a website to load is the more people would abandon it. Besides, Google keeps a record of the sites people visit and how much time they spend on the site. If your website loads fast, you have a higher chance of appearing on Google’s first page of search results.

Here’s how a slow site affects you:

• Reduces your page visitors/loss of traffic
• No conversion
• Poor customer experience
• High bounce rate
• Reduction in search engine ranking
• Your customers will doubt your reliability

How then do you increase your site’s speed to prevent all these from happening?

You can improve and increase your website’s speed by:

1. Getting A Fast And Reliable Web Hosting Provider

Most times, your website could be loading slowly because of your website host. This is why it is very important to use a good web host. If you don’t, no matter how hard you try to give your visitors a seamless user experience,  your web host will ruin all your efforts. A good web host is supposed to take care of certain issues for you in terms of speed. From updated software to quality hardware,  there’s a lot your host can do you increase your site’s speed.

2. Use Simple Design And Themes

Using a complicated website design and theme can contribute to a slow site. If they are not optimized, they can slow down your site in general. An expert web designer should be able to use the right software and code to give you a simple but lovely design.

3. Optimize Your Site’s Images

Too many images can cause your site to slow down. If you must have so many images on your site, then you should optimize them. Large images are generally difficult to download and take a longer time to load. You can easily compress and optimize your images to make them easier to load. Optimizing involves reducing the image size, format,  and quality settings.

4. Reviewing Installed Plugins

Some plugins on your website may be the reason your website is loading slowly. You should take out time to review all your installed plugins carefully. Check for high-quality ones and eliminate the ones, not in use. Also, ensure that they are optimized for speed so that you don’t overload your server. Another thing to have in mind is that you should only install plugins from trusted sources. If you install from a fishy or unauthorized source, you may develop problems from your site later on.

5. Speed Optimization Plugin

You should install a good speed optimization plugin to help improve and increase your site’s speed. There are lots of them such as WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, and W3 Total Cache. These work well with WordPress websites. The plugins will help to sort issues regarding website speed.

In all, no website owner wants a site that loads slowly as it can tell on your business. You will lose traffic and may lose your site eventually. Invest in your site’s speed as it is the first thing visitors notice when they visit your site.