You will want to ask: why should I worry about page speed and load time of my blog? In this post, haven’t i done enough to set the ball rolling?My dear, if you have done enough, your blog page speed and load time would have improved greatly; maybe you go over to GtMetrix and test your site.
In this post, I will be sharing with you how to optimize your overall WordPress blog’s performance: increasing the page speed and loading time.
Why you should optimize page speed and loading times
1. Google rankings.
Site speed is a ranking factor. “You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed.” Says Google experts.
2. Make your visitors happy and keep their attention.
The longer your site takes to load, the more likely a visitor will leave without converting.
3. Handle traffic spikes with ease.
Caching and other performance optimizations reduce the chance of your website going down if you get a lot of visitors at once.
4. Save money.
Faster, smaller page sizes will reduce your bandwidth costs.
Other Reasons are:
5. 40% of people including you abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
6. A site or page that delays 1 second before responding can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
7. For instance, if an e-commerce site is making $1000 per day, one second page delay of this site can potentially cost you $250,000 in lost sales per year.
Effects of Plugins
Plugins are usually the primary cause for slowing down your site. Poorly written plugins tend to load extra files or make unnecessary requests. Your theme, if poorly written, can also have the same effect on your site.
• Deactivate the plugins that you’re not actively using.
• Delete your unused themes and plugins.
• Switch to a better theme and plugins if necessary.
Use the P3 Plugin Performance Profiler to determine which plugins are impacting your site the most. Deactivate and delete any that are not essential.
The quality of the plugins matter more than the number. For instance, a friends blog has well over 45 plugins activated, yet it has a Page Speed Grade of 97% and a page load time of 2.97s.
Use this tool to analyze your site: GtMetrix
Embeds and Other External Requests
External requests often slow down your site. They add to the total number of requests, are not cached, and the external servers are often slow to respond.
● Any images you use should be hosted on your own domain.
● If you are using multiple analytics services, use Segment.io to combine them into a single request.
● If you are displaying share counts, remove the buttons from the social networks that your audience doesn’t use.
● For other embeds and external requests, such as Facebook Like Boxes and YouTube videos, use only what you need.
Other Performance Improvements
● Host videos and other large files offsite to reduce your server load and bandwidth. Use a CDN (content delivery network) to deliver files faster.
● Optimize your database tables. Most backup plugins can do this automatically.
● Combine JavaScript and CSS files. Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
● Remove unnecessary data in your database (i.e. spam comments and their metadata, tables from plugins you’re no longer using).
● Remove unnecessary files, such as old backups, from your
server.
