Guidance to improve Website Performance

Performance Enhancing Practices

  • Test your WordPress website speed
  • Finding a proper WordPress Host
  • Audit your WordPress Plugins
  • Cache Everything
  • Benefits of a CDN
  • Downsize your static assets
  • Serve up statistic assets

You have products and services that you want to sell online and for that you have created a great workflow and then create a website though website speed is very slow.Website speed is very crucial pyramid of your business success.

There are some steps require to have your WordPress website work smooth, solid and super speedy.

Test your WordPress website speed

Any improvement always starts with real facts. First, you understand the speed of your website and then take steps to reach better than it asap.

Speed Testing Tools

WebPageTest

WebPageTest gives you a good idea of the actual time that a website takes to load, and identifies whether it’s the back-end or front-end causing a site to load slowly.

Google PageSpeed Insights

If the problem is at the front-end site Google PageSpeed Insights is best to identify what you can improve on the front-end.So, based on your observation you can take appropriate action and that makes your work easy to resolve the issue.

Finding a proper WordPress Host

Now, after testing your website and if it’s speed is low, then one critical part of it is may be the WordPress Host.

Sometimes it happens that you host your website with a branded one though that host also shared with multiple websites than it impacts on your website in terms of slow speed, frequent downtime and irregular performance.

In that case you host website to another hosting provider and check the speed of the website again.

Audit your plugins

We generally add plugins for specific functionality, but not on the compromise of the website speed. So, make sure that whenever you install any plugin in your website then immediately check its impact on the speed of the website.

This type of mistake happens by the inexperienced programmers or those make a ton of database queries and require intensive logic processing.

Query Monitor is the tool that sifts through your whole site and reports back what percentage of total load time each plugin is responsible for using

If there are plugins that you just can’t live without but still make your site slow, there are ways to continue using them. Generally, if you determine that a plugin is loading slowly, the next step is to talk to your hosting company to increase the memory on your server.

Cache everything

Caching, both on the server side and client side, is an important part of the WordPress site performance.Once a user loads your site for the first time, you can take advantage of browser capabilities to cache the contents of that site locally, so on the next visit the user already has them loaded.

Enable server-side caching with WordPress is by using the W3 Total Cache plugin.

Use CDN

A content delivery network (or CDN) is a network of servers that serves up your website and its assets from different locations based on the user’s location.

Some of the most popular CDNs include Amazon Web Services, CloudFlare, and MaxCDN.

Images

Images are often the biggest files on a page, responsible for the largest delay in page load time.The good thing about images, however, is that unlike CSS and JavaScript, most browsers load them asynchronously even though

  1. You’re serving as few images as possible
  2. Those images are compressed as much as possible

We have used and recommend TinyPNG for WordPress and Ewww Cloud Optimizer to handle the compression and optimization of images uploaded to WordPress.

JavaScript

The golden rules of optimizing JavaScript are simple: Serve as few JavaScript files as possible, minify , and concatenate

WordPress Website speed and its impact on your business.

  • Reducing load time by 3 seconds increases revenue by 7-12%.
  • If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second delay in the average site load time could potentially cost the site owner $2.5 million in annual lost sales.
  • A site that loads in 3 seconds or more yields 22% fewer conversions than a site that loads in one second.

After you’ve gone through these performance-enhancing practices, if your website is still really slow, we’d recommend hiring a WordPress Expert who can look into it and find the source of the problem and/or choosing a new WordPress host.