Don’t leave a WordPress site slow
Having a slow website hurts your business in a number of ways. The most obvious problem being that the common consumer does not have the patience to wait for your website to load, and will likely leave before even seeing what you have to offer. If your website takes more than 5 seconds to load, by most standards that is considered slow, and you should look into speeding your website up right away, and here’s why.
Having a slow WordPress site means your website doesn’t get seen
Not everyone knows this, but customers leaving your website due to long load times is the least of your worries. If your website does not load in under 5 seconds, your website might not be seen at all by potential customers searching for your business. Google considers loading times very important when it decides who ranks first on their search engine. The faster your website loads, the more likely you will be seen at the top of Google searches, and the better your business will do because of it. This is especially important if your website is a source of income.
Thankfully, if your WordPress site is running slowly, there are 5 simple steps you can take
1) Remove any WordPress plugins you don’t need
The mistake many amateur web developers make is trying out a bunch of plugins, and forgetting to remove them. WordPress plugins are nifty tools that make designing a website much easier. It’s an easy mistake to make if you’re just starting out, especially if you don’t know what all of them do. It is very important to take a look at your plugins and deactivate and delete any plugins that you are not actively using, because they can and will slow down your WordPress website.
Equally important it making sure that the plugins that you are using are efficiently coded. Knowing the right plugins to install can be time consuming and take a lot of research. Certain plugins, particularly free ones tend to be inefficiently designed and have extra needless code that slows down your website. It is important to research what plugins are best to use for your website before adding them.
If you need help with this you can contact us, and we will help you. Call us at (858) 481-1365 or E-mail us at dan@swssupport.com!
2) Check the size of images on your website
Always make sure that the images on your website are as small as possible without losing image quality. You might be thinking that “bigger is better” and nice high quality images will grab your customer’s attention, but this is not the case. When a customer loads your website, they have to load every image, or piece of media on that page, so compressing your images, videos, sound clips, and other media can cut your load time in half. You won’t lose any significant amount of quality, and potential customers will be able to browse your website nice and quick.
3) Make sure your homepage does not have all the content
It is understandable when you’re a business that you would want to put your best foot forward and show everything that your website has to offer on the landing page. It is important to limit what you put on your front page though, because all that content is what’s loading first. A slow front page means a slow website, no matter what. If you have images on your front page, make sure those images are especially small, and make sure to be very conservative with widgets and extra features. Your customer will appreciate a nice, clean, easy to navigate website more anyway. Sleek web design is good web design.
4) Free is not always best
Much like with free WordPress plugins, free WordPress templates, specifically third-party ones, are not always the best to use. Free WordPress website templates are often filled with extra, careless coding that slows down your website. When using a WordPress template, it’s safest to purchase a template from a trustworthy site or modify your website from one of the free templates that come with WordPress.
5) Your host may not be all it’s cracked out to be
If you’ve already checked all of the possibilities above and your website is still running slow, your host might not be good enough to support your website. Cheap web hosting may seem appealing when you are just trying to get your website up, but you get what you pay for. Cheap hosting means cheap service most of the time, and while you don’t always need to bring in the big guns and get the most expensive hosting there is, make sure that your hosting website is reputable. For all of our websites, we rely on a service called Bluehost.com
If your website is running slow and you don’t know what to do about it, Call us at (858) 481-1365 or E-mail us at dan@swssupport.com!
