Is your website performing at its peak? Would you like it to load faster? I can help! Website speed is important to your guests. If a page takes too long to render, they will likely move on. There are many factors that influence website speed.
- Hosting environment
- Software versions
- Image sizing
- CSS and JavaScript files
- Caching
- CDN (content delivery network)
- Page builders
In the WordPress world, many of these can be addressed with a couple of plugins. However, let’s discuss your hosting environment. If you use shared hosting, which many of you do, some environments are overloaded with websites and have limited resources. The best way to overcome hosting environment constraints is with a CDN. Another part of your hosting environment is the version of PHP that runs your site. At this time you should be using version 8.1 or greater. I use version 8.2 whenever possible.
You should keep your site up to date. WordPress core software is now version 6.4.2 (version 6.5 will be released soon) and your plugins should support that. Do keep everything up to date, both for performance and security reasons.
Proper image sizing is important, along with the specification of width and height dimensions. For example, don’t use an oversized image for a thumbnail. If you need a thumbnail, please create one. There several software programs available for image sizing. While Adobe Photoshop is the standard, there is also GIMP which is a free alternative. Another element of image optimization is the utilization of next-gen formats such as webp. There are several good plugins that will create webp formats of your media library.
Your theme and plugins usually load many CSS and JavaScript files. While they are necessary, many do not have to be loaded until the end of the page rendering process. These files slow down page rendering. A good caching plugin can defer their loading which in turn speeds up the page.
Caching is critical. Unless you have a highly dynamic website, many elements of a site can be saved in server memory and reused across website visits. If you setup caching both at the browser and server level, you can dramatically improve performance.
My last point on the use of page builders is that they add another layer of software to your website and it adds weight to each page thus increasing page load time. If you use a page builder, please pay attention to this review. It is imperative that you optimize every element of your site.
As always, if you have any questions about performance optimization please get in touch.