Your website’s loading speed is one of the most important things that you should never take for granted.
Why?
This is obviously the first thing that visitors will notice about your site and their first impression can make or break your credibility.
Website load time is super important
Slow websites may be penalized by Google, resulting to lower page rankings.
What can you do?
If you want to improve the overall performance of your site and draw in more traffic, it is essential to fix and improve the loading time of your site.
Here are some quick and easy fixes to your problem:
What to Do?
The first step is to isolate the problem and determine if it is really a website error or a connection issue.
A lot of people make quick conclusions and their dilemma turn out to be just a simple Internet or browser issue.
Before anything else, you must first isolate the problem.
Thankfully, there are now several tools online that will help you determine exactly what needs fixing on your site. Some great free speed test online tools include: Pingdom Website Speed Test and PageSpeed Insights, which analyze data from your website.
These tools are designed to do in-depth analysis on your pages and show results in just a couple of minutes.
Typically, the results would specify important areas that you need to improve. You will be informed of the critical areas that need immediate attention. Additionally, areas that are functioning well will also be displayed.
With these results, you will have a breakdown of what you need to look into and repair. The level of detail in the results will depend on the type of service offered by the tests. While most of these are free, there are premium services that will be able to perform more in-depth analysis of your pages.
How to Fix Slow WordPress Website?
Once you have determined the specific areas that need to be repaired, it will be easier to get your website up and loading quickly again. There are certain tools and apps that automatically does quick fix repairs but this may not work on all issues.
Here are a few fixes of the most common causes of slow website loading:
- Optimize your images. This is one of the most common causes and also the easiest to fix. Unoptimized images will consume a lot of bandwidth and will cause slow loading. Before publishing your posts, make sure each image is scaled down and adjusted appropriately.
- Avoid complex codes. Bulky and ineffective codes can also cause a lot of stress on your site. To maximize speed, clean up the backend of your WordPress and take out unnecessary codes.
- Don’t overload with external media. Although a nice video or Instagram photo looks interesting on a post, too much external media embedded on a page will drag down your loading time. It is not bad to embed external clips, just make sure to do this in moderation.
- Reconsider Flash embeds. Another culprit is Flash players, which are just bulky and hard to load. Since your visitors are most likely using mobile devices, it is best to design your pages for mobile users.
There are other causes like server problems that might need more serious fixes. Typically, server problems will take longer to repair because it will be up to your web host to troubleshoot on their end. In these cases, your host might need to change DNS settings or expand memory.
