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5 minute read
At Supersonic Playground, we use various tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, GT Metrix and Pingdom Website Speed Test to benchmark our client websites’ performance and give us a good idea of what might be influencing speed.
Google suggests that a website should load in under 3 seconds on both mobile and desktop devices. Research conducted by Think with Google tells us that websites that take longer than 5 seconds to load – have a bounce rate of 90% compared to just 32% if it loads in under 3 seconds. Moreover, 79% of consumers state they wouldn’t return to a slow website.
To emphasise the importance of speed a little more, it’s also a vital ranking factor for Google.
Please read our blog: 3 reasons why speed matters for more detail on why website speed is important.
Now that we know why speed is critical let’s look at five tips to help you improve your website’s speed.
Your hosting solution can have a severe impact on the speed and general performance (uptime and security) of your website. So it’s vital to do your research and find a hosting provider that offers everything you need. It’s also important to note that hosting should never be an afterthought or purchased cheaply. Good hosting can range from a few hundred pounds per year to several thousand, but if you’re considering investing a significant sum on a new website, why scrimp on hosting when it could make or break the success of your new site? As an example, we offer annual hosting for our clients at £300 + VAT per year on our dedicated WP Engine server.
We’ve listed a few different types of hosting below. The best hosting for your WordPress site will depend on its size, complexity and what you’re looking to achieve.
Learn more about the different types of hosting
Installing a caching plugin to your website can dramatically reduce the time a page takes to load. Caching creates a copy of your website and then serves this copy of your site to users rather than fetching it every time someone clicks through. We recommend WP Rocket as our caching plugin of choice to clients. Caching can also be enabled on a server level, so finding a hosting provider that offers performance features like this is key.
Images are great for adding visual impact to a website and helping your content engage visitors. However, they can also affect performance and slow down your website, especially if they’re not optimised. A well-built website should resize images so that they’re not too big or slow to load, but it’s still worth taking the time to optimise them to make their file size as small as possible. There are free services online such as Tiny PNG, or you can pay a small fee to services such as Imagify to bulk-optimise images.
We also recommend using lazy loading on your website to improve loading times. With lazy loading, images will only load once they enter the visible screen, i.e. when a user scrolls down to them instead of all of the images loading when someone lands on the page.
When it comes to the number of items on a page, fewer is better, so you should be mindful of blogs or news articles that may have no set limit, causing indefinite scrolling, slowing down the load speed. This also applies to other areas of the site where you may have excessive functions or features. It’s essential to balance the length of the page and the number of items on that page with speed and general user experience; too many items can also be a little overwhelming for your visitors.
The great thing about WordPress is that it is an extendable platform for DIY users, with plugins that can help you achieve just about anything. The downside of this is that each plugin you add to your website comes with additional ‘bloat’, so the more you use it, the slower your website will become. This is because all plugins are made in isolation and do not consider your specific website or other plugins you might pair it with.
Third-party themes have the same problems. These can often be very slow, with some free or cheap themes barely scraping 10 out of 100 on Google PageSpeed Insights. But, again, this is because they cater to individuals and businesses from various industries with different functional requirements; hence they’re usually packed with features you’ll never use.
Plugins should be used sparingly, so if you find yourself needing to use many of them to achieve advanced, comprehensive or complex functionality, you may need to consider a more custom website built to your specific needs. Working with a web design agency is the best way to do this as they will strip everything out and build your site from scratch, minimising bloat and maximising performance.
Our friendly team of designers, developers and digital specialists are ready and waiting to help with your website project.