Do you want to speed up your WordPress site? Fast-loading pages improve user experience, increase your pageviews, and helps with your WordPress SEO. In this blog post, we will share the most useful WordPress speed optimisation tips you can use to boost WordPress performance and speed up your eCommerce website.
Make Sure You’re Using A Lightweight, Well Coded Theme
If you’re using a poorly developed bloated theme, then you’ll most likely have longer server response times and a slow loading website compared to a website with a well developed one. You will often find that some of the themes built with page builders are slow and bulky (not always though) however if your theme was developed just for your WordPress website you should expect to have fast page load times and a relatively low server response time. If you can’t afford a custom theme then look for a minimalist theme that has good reviews for page load times.
One thing you can do to test a theme is trying before you buy when trying out a new WordPress theme, most themes will let you view before you buy, or run page speed tests on other sites that are using that theme.
To Many Plugins
Every plugin you install on your website adds code that needs to be loaded every time a page loads, so think about the plugins you have installed and activated. It is a bit of a compromise, as you will want certain functionality on your site and you may have to sacrifice speed to have that. Not all plugins are equal though so if you find a particular plugin is slowing down your website, look for alternatives, it maybe you just need to pick another one or a paid plugin instead of a free one.
Before installing a plugin ask yourself “Is the feature I’m adding worth sacrificing a few milliseconds of my page load speed?”
Install A Good Caching Plugin
There are quite a few good caching plugins out there available for WordPress and WooCommerce, you may have to experiment with a few different ones to see which ones have the best effect on your website. The most effective caching plugins are usually paid plugins but also offer a free version with limited functionality, if you’re looking for a great plugin that proves to be the most effective, you should check out WP Fastest Cache or WPRocket.
Optimise Images
This is a common issue that we see on eCommerce website. The images on your site are often larger than they need to be, both in the amount of pixels and filesize.
WordPress has a build in tool that allows you to crop and resize images, you can edit images online within your website as soon as you upload them or you can go to your media library, select and image and then press “edit image” and edit them there. We would however recommend that you work out what size images your website needs and then make sure you upload compressed images at the correct size.
Hosting Provider
Hosting for a WordPress site is extremely important and an important factor when it comes to page speed. If you have a slow server, you will never get a good page speed. This doesn’t mean you need to spend hundreds on a special dedicated server but it does mean you need to pick a hosting company that offers fast, business-class web hosting.
Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of web servers in different locations around the world that work together to deliver your website to your visitors by serving it from the nearest server to their location. This is a great way of speeding up your website.
If you need help improving the speed of your WordPress website the first step is to sign up for our FREE Website & Marketing Audit we can look at your website and provide you with actionable insights you can use to improve your site.
