How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website - Part 1 | Denver WordPress Design

WordPress website speed is a very important piece to your online presence, marketing plan, SEO and much more. We sometimes pass over the fact that our WordPress website might need a little fine tuning and adjusting to keep up with our competitors.

According to a recent study, 47% of visitors expect a page to load in under 2 seconds and 57% of visitors will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. A few points to back up these findings:

In 2006, Amazon reported that a 100-millisecond increase in page speed translated to a 1% increase in its revenue
A few years back Google decided that it would take page speed into account when a website was ranked

Just those two alone will light a fire inside you to get moving on your website speed!

Here are a handful of ideas to get you going:

Pick a Good Host

Probably one of the most important aspects to any website, is the foundation. If you have a weak foundation, you’re never going to build an great structure on top of it. Although the cheap shared hosting environments can work for some websites, they won’t do the trick for all.

Select a Good Theme

These days there are a lot of people around the world that rely on WordPress as a business and a tool, unfortunately not all are trained and educated on the best practices. Make sure to test out the theme’s demo extensively; looking for page speed using a tool called Pingdom and the general functionality to meet your goals. Great WordPress Design will always affect the experience you are trying to deliver for your visitors.

Content Delivery Network

We recently started rolling out CDN’s on a lot of our heavier websites and saw a dramatic increase in load time, thus affecting page speed and conversions. A CDN is a host of sorts that utilizes servers from around the world to deliver content quicker. Say someone is visiting your website in Europe, the CDN would pick out the closest server geographically to their location which dramatically increases your page load time.

Always remember a better experiences for your visitor will increase the chances of a future partnership / sales. Check back next week for Part 2 of How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website.

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