People don't have enough patience for waiting for websites to load. Impatience of users often cause of high bounce rate. Find out how to cut your site speed in half and provide the best user experience for your visitors.
WordPress is currently being used to power more than 31% of all sites on the web. The secret behind its popularity is the fact that it enables individuals without much technical knowledge to get a website up and running in record time. And with the wealth of customization options available, it's easy to create a website that stands out from the crowd.
Unfortunately, WordPress users sometimes tend to go a bit too far with their customizations, which often results in websites that are slow to load. This is problematic for two reasons. One, long loading times will directly impact your site's search engine rank, as site load speed is a confirmed ranking factor. Two, long waiting times will impoverish your user experience, leading to higher bounce rates, lower average time on page, and reduced conversions. It is therefore imperative to take the appropriate measures for making your WordPress site load as fast as possible.
Since there are already plenty of articles on the web on the topic of improving site load speed, we will instead focus on how your choice of WordPress plugins can affect loading speed.
Apart from plugin-based speed optimizations, there are also a number of platform-agnostic strategies which you can implement to further reduce page load speed. These practices work equally well for content management systems other than WordPress, including Joomla, Drupal, and Magento.
Your choice of hosting service can have a significant impact on website load speed. If you are using shared hosting, your site might experience unexpected slowdowns depending on how much traffic your server co-renters are generating. Switching to dedicated or server, or opting for cloud hosting are common ways to mitigate this issue.
Each time a page on your website redirects to another page, the visitor will have to wait for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete, which can significantly lower page load speed. To avoid this issue, make sure that your site has a few redirects as possible.
If a site visitors requests multiple files from your web server, it will download each file individually, closing and reopening the connection each time, creating unnecessary delays. To prevent this from happening, you can enable HTTP keep-alive, a feature that enables you to use one connection to fulfill multiple requests.
Speed is one of the most important factors for the success of any website. Fortunately, by using the right WordPress plugins, you can significantly improve your page load times, earning you the favor of both search engines and your audience.