4 methods to improve the speed of your WordPress site
POSTED ONMARCH 15, 2022BY SEO POWA
The speed and performance of a site is of great importance. Whether for an optimal user experience or to improve the SEO of a website, it is essential to take this factor into account. Too long a loading time makes navigation unpleasant for Internet users who will end up leaving the site and going to a competitor, not to mention that it also harms your SEO.
To optimize the speed of your site, we will try to simplify your task as much as possible with a list of free extensions, this is by far the simplest and easiest way, especially since there are extensions that do it very good. The optimal solution is therefore to install plugins on your wordpress site that will perform its various tasks perfectly.
Before you begin, we highly recommend checking your site's performance using Google Page Speed, GT Metrics, or Pingdom Tools. Each tool analyzes the content of the page and generates suggestions to make it faster (Image weight, page performance, etc.). To analyze your site, it's very simple: just copy / paste the URL of your home page.
Here are 4 methods to improve the speed of your WordPress site:
Minify your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files
Minifying helps reduce the amount of code that needs to be transferred across the web. The less the code will be heavy, the more bandwidth will be conserved and the faster the site will display, for this here is a suggestion of 2 extensions:
Better WordPress Minify : this is a plugin that will allow you to perform this action automatically. Also compatible with multisites, it is for me one of the best plugins to improve the speed of your site.
Autoptimize : complete and quick to set up. It makes your site faster and saves you bandwidth by aggregating and minifying JS, CSS, and HTML into a single file.
Compress images
Without a doubt, images are the elements that take the longest to load. These are the heaviest files on the site and if they are not optimized for your website, you are heading for disaster.
You have two solutions either to do it manually by saving your images in web format (as photoshop software offers), or to use software such as ShortPixel Image Optimizer or Imagify which will automatically compress all the images present on your WordPress site as well as all the images that you will add as you go along.
Cache
Caching your site will allow users who have already visited your website not to reload all the content present (but only what they have not already visited). It's a big relief for your servers and a big improvement for the user.
There are different plugins that can fulfill this function.
W3 Total Cache , the must, is the fastest and most complete extension to evaluate performance on WordPress. It improves the user experience on your site by increasing the performance of your server. The extension caches your site assets, reducing loading time and providing an easy-to-do CDN integration.
WP Super Cache (combines very well with Autoptimize), "Automattic" plugin (the company behind WordPress.com, which is perhaps more reassuring for some), this extension offers many options but requires a minimum of configuration to work best. Despite its qualities, WP Super Cache is still less complete than W3 Total Cache.
WP Fastest Cache , translated into French, this extension is simple and it offers quite advanced functions to optimize the performance of its site (optimize HTML, combine style sheets and JavaScript files, etc.).
GPA
Behind this AMP acronym hides a technology developed by Google to make our mobile sites even faster. AMP pages are similar to HTML pages but sometimes use different markup, additional rules and above all important restrictions, especially on the use of JavaScript and CSS.
Note that WordPress already offers a plugin to automatically generate an AMP version of your site. Once the plugin is installed, it will automatically create URLs with a /amp/ at the end of the address on all your articles, however there are additional settings to make if you want a visual rendering that is a little nicer and aesthetic.
Whatever methods you decide to implement, end up re-measuring your site speed so that you can compare your site speed before and after installing and setting up your new extensions.
As you will have understood, the speed of your site is a major issue in the search for performance, it is therefore necessary to optimize your site.
Optimize your site for:
- Reduce the Bounce Rate.
- Increase the time spent on your site.
- Increase the number of page views.
- Improve your position in search engines.
To summarize, having an optimized site is better for you, for your visitors and for your SEO, so many reasons to devote some time to it.
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