Did you know that Google actively demotes websites that load slowly on its search engine results pages? Did you know that conversion is much less likely when the site is slow to load and non-responsive? Do you know that the website’s performance is one of the biggest predictors of its success? Any reading of the literature will show the immense importance of performance, especially when it comes to WordPress websites.
If you’re convinced, the next question to ask is ‘what’s making my website slow’? This article compiles a list of valuable tips that help you increase your website’s loading speed, make it more performant, and ensure it is succeeding.
#1 Is Your Hosting Up To The Task?
One of the most common mistakes people new to WordPress make is choosing a cheap and slow host. When developing the website, most people want to take it online as quickly as possible, and because most people don’t know how successful their idea will be and they don’t have a lot of initial capital, they go with the cheapest hosting possible.
While cheap hosts might be adequate for when your website only gets 5 concurrent visitors at a time, and monthly visits alternate between 500 and 5000 visitors. It will quickly hit a hard limit as your website gets more popular. As your website is taking off, one of the best things you can do to improve performance is to move to a high-quality hosting service that can handle a large volume of requests. This will be a total game-changer early on.
#2 Use The Latest Tech
Using the latest tech and ensuring your WordPress, the plugins, and the themes you use are all the latest version doesn’t only improve security and give you more features, but it will also increase the performance and the speed of your website – just as a simple example, you can increase your site’s performance and serve twice as many clients if you simply move from PHP 5 to PHP 7.2.
Although updating your WordPress version is often an easy task, updating your PHP language or certain plugins can be an arduous process. You should do a cost-benefit analysis by estimating how much time it’ll take for you to update certain elements of your website and Researching how much performance gain you can expect.
#3 The Theme You Use Will Determine How Responsive Is Your Website
The theme you use in your website is perhaps the element that has the most influence on the performance of your website: if you use a text-only theme, your website will load no matter the device requesting it, or the server hosting it – on the other hand if you use a theme with high-quality 8K assets and multiple concurrent running animations, almost no device in the world will be able to run your website smoothly no matter the host you choose or their network speed. If you want your website to be performant, you need a theme that uses compressed assets, lazy loading, implemented animations optimally, doesn’t have too many render-blocking resources, etc. If you’re not technically savvy and you want to turn your PSD design into a WordPress theme, you’ll likely be unable to ensure it operates smoothly. That’s why you should use convert your psd project to woocommerce shop with Acclaim an experienced agency instead of trying to do it yourself through trial-and-error.
