Creating a website is easy, all thanks to the numerous platforms. But just creating a site and waiting for traffic to come your way is not enough. It is most important to ensure that the site performs optimally.
Say, a user clicked on the link and the site takes more than a few seconds to load. This is all that is necessary to put him off and wander elsewhere. Do not believe us? Here are a few stats that would convince the word to you:
- More than 45% of people say that waiting for pages to load is one thing that they dislike most while browsing the internet.
- The sites that tend to load within five seconds tend to enjoy 70% longer average sessions by users.
- Conversation rates could drop by 7% on a 100-millisecond delay in load time.
As you can see, speed is an important factor as far as the site performance is concerned.
Is It Necessary To Improve Site Speed?
You must check your site for its loading speed from time to time. As a matter of fact, Google tends to prefer websites that load faster after it rolled out its Speed Algorithm. What’s more, as the stats above revealed, people are likely to lose interest in a site if it takes more than two seconds to load. Yes, it is a busy world that we live in.
If you own an e-commerce website, it becomes the utmost necessity that the user stays on the page while it gets loaded. This means that you have to impress the users with the least possible time. This is the reason that most online casinos in New Jersey are optimized for speed – they don’t want to lose their customers.
So how do you optimize your WordPress website? We have compiled certain tools and plugins here that would make your website optimization process manageable.
Tools to Test Site Performance
There are many tools that can help in WordPress speed optimization. Some of them are listed below.
GTmetrix
This is a WordPress plugin that monitors your website’s page load speed and alerts you when the site under-performs. You can analyze the site and schedule daily, weekly or monthly reports on the analysis. It enables you to access details regarding the site from your WordPress dashboard.
GTmetrix gives you recommendations on how to improve the site along with a detailed report on page load time test. The only prerequisite is that you need to have a GTmetrix account which is free.
Google Speed Insights
Page speed insights or PSI is used to get reports on how a page performs. Also, it gives suggestions on bettering the performance. PSI gives two types of data – lab data and field data.
The former is collected in a controlled environment and helps resolve performance issues. The latter collects user-experiences in the real world and is more accurate. The report is topped by a score that explains the page’s performance. If the score is 90 or above, the page is fast, 50-90 is moderate and below 50 means slow.
Pingdom Tools
This tool, again, gives you an idea about website performance. With a lot of information like page size, load time and analysis report of each page, Pingdom provides great insight into your site. It even saves the performance history, thereby enabling you to compare the past and present performances after optimizations.
WebPagetest
This particular tool is helpful if your website has users across the world. It gives an overview of the site’s performance and the loading speed. What makes it unique is that you can select a country and provide the reports of how the site performs there.
Now that you have the required data in hand, are you wondering how to speed up WordPress site? Keep reading.
Some Powerful Plugins That Can Save Your Site
Although the speed of your website is greatly determined by its theme, here are a few powerful plugins that can help you in optimizing your WordPress website:
WP Rocket
If you are looking for a plugin with a user-friendly interface, WP Rocket has got your back. This is a caching and optimization plugin that increases the page load speed of WordPress sites.
The advantage here is that this plugin encapsulates a lot of interesting features along with the caching functionality. As a result, you can uninstall at least a few plugins if WP Rocket is in place.
It is an easy-to-configure plugin that can be used by both techies and non-techies alike. The plugin helps you in speeding up with its array of features including database optimization, image lazy loading, page caching, minification of CSS and Javascript and many more.
WP Super Minify
WP Super Minify is another plugin that can optimize the WordPress website. It is easy to use and comes free of cost. Minifying would mean that all HTML, CSS and other files are combined and compressed before they are presented to the users. This is a great way to minimize page loading time.
However, keep in mind that certain themes don’t work well with this plugin. So, try doing a test run to see that the theme and the plugin are in perfect sync.
LazyLoad by WP Rocket
Do you know what happens when a user clicks on your website? The site tries to open the entire page including all the images and other unnecessary files. This would take forever for the page to load. But the fact is that all these files are not required to be opened while loading a page. Since the images take more time to load, it is best left to be loaded when necessary.
LazyLoad by WP Rocket does exactly this and helps you speed up WordPress. It lets you load only the necessary elements on the page so that the user doesn’t have to wait longer. In places of these elements, you can choose to display preview thumbnails.
Optimole
Although an image optimization plugin, Optimole helps in site optimization as well. The best part of this plugin is that it is cloud-based and hence, it doesn’t put an extra load on your server.
It processes the images on a page in real-time and the right image size that fits the user’s browser is chosen automatically. It then uses lazy loading to display the images. The plus point is that the image size is reduced without the user coming to know of the background work.
The Bottom Line
It doesn’t matter which plugin or theme you use on your site. All that matters is your website must perform in the most optimized way with the least page load time. You could go for a single plugin or a combination of a few. Start with one and see the difference it makes. You can add more if required but, make sure not to overload your site.