8 Simple SEO Tips to Speed Up Your WP Website

 

Is your website slow, laggy or taking ages to load a single page on either your desktop or mobile device? If this is happening to you, then imagine what it must be like trying to navigate your website as a customer? Statistically, even something as small as a one-second delay time can reduce your page views by as much as 11%! If you have 10,000 monthly visitors, that’s an extra 1,000 visitors you’re missing out on!

 

Naturally, it also reduces your customer satisfaction rates and therefore a loss in conversion rates, sometimes as much as 7%. To stop this being a problem for your WP business, here are eight key aspects of your website you can address to ensure your website is running at optimal speeds.

 

Optimise Your Images

One of the most important parts of delivering high-quality content posts is having a high-quality image to accompany it. However, if you’ve been upload any images that are a few hundred kilobytes, you’re dramatically slowing your website down unnecessarily. Low sized images won’t  necessarily mean that you’ll lose quality. This is especially important if your website has galleries.

 

Compress Your Website Pages

If you haven’t already got the compression option on your WordPress website activated, do so now. Sometimes, high-quality is essential, and you won’t want to compromise on this quality for certain aspects. With this in mind, larger pages need to be compressed. On average, some sources state that compressing your web pages can increase speeds as much as 70%.

 

Analysis Your Website!

It’s nearly impossible to speed up your website if you’re not running tests to see what needs to be improved. Even Google provides you with a page speed test, known as PageSpeed Insights. Simply input your URL, and you’ll receive a ton of information on what needs to be improved and the current speed ranking on your website.

 

Don’t Forget Your Content!

Carrying out all the items on this list as well as the ones that aren’t, can take a huge amount of time, especially if your website has a lot of content. However, just because you’re streamlining your website, it doesn’t mean you should risk losing your content’s post consistency. If you find you’re writing out of time to create, proofread and edit your content, consider seeking assistant from writing services found only through either dedicated writing services or through freelancers. Some of the most popular websites include;

• Upwork
• People Per Hour
• Paper Fellows
• Big Assignments
• State of Writing
• Contently

 

Conduct a Spring Clean

If you’ve been working on your website for some time, the chances are that you’ve tried and tested many plugins and themes along the way while trying to find the perfect fit for you. Head over to your plugins page and be ruthless. If you’ve got themes and plugins sitting there that you no longer use, get rid of them because they’re only slowing your website down. It’s also highly recommended that you do this with your media library as well.

 

Upgrade Your Website

Ensuring that you keep your website updated is vital to its speed. This doesn’t just refer to the mandatory WordPress system updates either. I also mean aspects of your website, such as PHP. If your website is running PHP 5, you need to upgrade to PHP 7. It’s estimated that this can boost your your website’s speed by as much as 300% (uncached) which is why this step is so important.

 

Cache Your Website

I cannot state this point enough. If you’re not caching your website, you might as well as be tying big virtual heavy bricks to your website pages before sending them to your users. Granted, it may not be beneficial to first-time users. However, these users will instantly notice the speed once they return to your website again.

 

Refer to Your Hosting Company

Always check the hosting plan that your website is running on. Going with a shared hosting plan may have seemed like a good idea at the time, especially when you’re considering your budget, but now your page traffic is increasing, and more and more people are coming to your website, it might be time to move forward and think about getting an upgrade.

 

From shared hosting, you can move up to Cloud Hosting, VPS Hosting and then Dedicated Hosting. Each package gets more expensive as you move up but either compared Cloud Hosting to standard hosting, you’re already reducing your load times again by up to 50%. If your traffic and your website is getting slow, it may be time to look into your options.

 

Conclusion

Taking your time to ensure all these points are covered accurately reaps many rewards. These are just eight of the main aspects you should be considering, but in reality, there are so many tweaks you can make. However, by covering the main aspects, you can effectively reduce your loading times, increasing your page views, your lead volume and, therefore, your conversion rates, always resulting in a more successful WordPress website.

 

Bio

Sharon Conwell has been a content marketer and ghost writer at over 20 online projects. She’s specializing in content creation and optimization. She loves coffee, tulips and her Shih Tzu named Bobby. Feel free to contact her on her blog MyWritingWay.com.