The WordPress content management system is an open-source CMS. It is free to use and has a huge community of developers who contribute to its development – It’s renowned as a powerful tool for creating beautiful websites.

However, it does have a few drawbacks. One of these is that it can take longer to load than other CMS platforms.

This is due to the large number of files that need to be downloaded from the server.

Today I am going to give you some tips that will improve your WordPress PageSpeed. These tips will help you get the most out of your WordPress website.

What is Google PageSpeed?

Google PageSpeed is a free tool from Google that analyses web pages and gives suggestions for improving them.

The tool looks at page speed, mobile-friendliness, and other factors to give you a score out of 100. A higher score means better performance.

Google PageSpeed insights help developers identify areas of improvement within their sites.

The tool analyses how long various resources take to load.

Then, based on what it finds out, it provides suggestions about ways to optimise performance.

In addition, it offers advice regarding which plugins or themes may slow things down.

Why is Google PageSpeed important?

Page speed matters because it affects user experience. Users expect websites to load quickly. If they don’t, they won’t stick around.

The average page load time is an essential factor in determining how well a user will interact with your content on your website.

If users have to wait too long before they see what they want to view or read, it could cause them to leave your site without interacting with any of its contents.

This means that if your visitors don’t like your product or service, they may not return again.

If you want to increase your website’s conversion rate, you should focus on improving its loading speed.

In fact, according to Google, a slow website can cost you around $2.5 million per year.

As a result, if you want to improve your website’s conversions, you should start focusing on improving your website’s loading speed.

Moreover, users who visit slower websites often leave without completing tasks. It means less revenue for businesses.

Furthermore, page speed impacts SEO rankings. A study conducted by MOZ found that web pages with poor loading times had lower search engine ranking scores.

Hence, improving page speed improves both UX and SEO.

A PageSpeed test is a tool used to measure how fast a website loads. The faster a site loads, the better for users.

Google has recently started penalising websites that load slowly. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load it could lose traffic from search engines like Google.

Therefore, you should make sure your site loads in under 3 seconds.

You can do this by optimising its code.

Furthermore, you should use a plugin like GTmetrix to find out where your site could be improved. It takes care of everything for you. Simply enter your site’s URL. Then, it checks whether your site meets certain criteria.

If it doesn’t meet these standards, it shows you exactly where improvements need to be made.

8 Easy Tips to Improve your WordPress PageSpeed provided by NowLoan.co.uk who have a super fast WordPress website gained following the tips below.

How To Improve Your Website’s Load Time?

If you’re looking to improve your website’s load time, there are several ways you can do this:

1) Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN’s are networks of servers located around the world that store copies of files.

When someone requests one from another server, they request it from the nearest copy available instead of downloading it directly from their computer.

This way, people who visit your site won’t need to spend as much bandwidth downloading large images, videos, etc., because those resources will already be stored somewhere else.

Furthermore, using a CDN allows you to serve different versions of each file depending on where the visitor comes from.

Using a content delivery network, for instance, you might decide to show visitors coming from Europe a version of your image optimised for European browsers while showing North American visitors a different version.

There are two main types of CDN’s:

STATIC – These networks only host static websites such as HTML pages, CSS stylesheets, Javascripts, etc. They also provide basic hosting services such as email accounts, FTP access, databases, etc.

DYNAMIC – These networks offer additional features, including dynamic web applications, e-commerce solutions, CMS platforms, etc.

Therefore, you should consider using a CDN if you run a blog, social media platform, online shop, etc.

2) Optimise Images

Images are generally the largest items on your website in terms of load-time. Optimising these files is essential to speeding up your site.

The size of your images can be reduced by compressing them, removing unnecessary data, etc.

There are many tools out there that allow you to compress images easily. Some examples include TinyPNG, ImageOptim, Compress JPEG, etc.

In addition, you can remove metadata information from images such as EXIF tags, IPTC tags, XMP tags, ICC profiles, etc.

Metadata info includes camera settings, date/time stamp, GPS coordinates, copyright information, etc.

It doesn’t matter whether you keep this information or delete it since no one ever sees it anyway. However, deleting it does make your photos smaller.

Therefore, to reduce the amount of data an image uses, you must first find out what kind of compression format it uses.

If you have already done this, you have to convert it into a new format. Finally, you have to upload the converted photo back onto your server.

3) Reduce the number of plugins

Plugins are small programs designed to extend and enhance other software.

More often than not, they come bundled with themes, but some developers create standalone plugins.

Plugins usually slow down websites because they require regular updates.. Because of this, it is advisable to limit the number of plugins installed on your site.

In addition, you may want to disable any unused ones. If you don’t know how to do this, then contact your theme developer. He’ll probably tell you exactly what needs to be done.

As a result, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble later on.

4) Minify CSS and JavaScript

Minifying code means taking long lines of text and breaking them into shorter pieces. The idea behind magnification is to increase page loading speed. In short, it makes your site faster.

It is necessary to have a “CSS Minifier” or “JS Minifier” plugin. Both will help you break large chunks of code into much more manageable sizes.

What’s more, both plugins automatically detect which parts of your code need to be minified so you won’t even notice when you’re doing it.

5) Use a caching plugin

Caches are temporary storage areas where frequently accessed content gets stored for quick retrieval.

It allows users to view previously viewed items without waiting for the original file to download again.

There are several types of caches available today:

PAGE CACHE: A page cache stores all the output generated by PHP scripts. For example, it saves the contents of every single webpage displayed on your site.

DATABASE CACHING: When using MySQL databases, database caching enables web servers to store queries results locally instead of sending requests to the database each time.

FILE CACHING: Files cached here are those that were already downloaded once before. They get saved in memory until needed again.

Furthermore, there are also third-party tools that offer similar features.

6) Use a compression plugin on your WordPress site

Compression refers to reducing the size of files while retaining their quality.

There are many different compressors available today, including Gzip, BZip2, LZMA, 7z, PPMd.

Most modern browsers support gzip compression natively. If you use FTP, you can enable compression through its settings.

7) Remove unused scripts

If you’ve ever tried to remove one script from your site only to realise that another one was still being loaded, you might have noticed that your site slowed down considerably.

It happens because specific scripts take longer to execute than others.

Some scripts like jQuery, MooTools, YUI, etc… are very heavyweight.

They contain lots of functions and objects that make up the core functionality of these libraries. As such, they tend to weigh quite heavily on websites.

Furthermore, they aren’t always necessary. You could easily replace them with lighter alternatives.

For instance, you could just as well use Google’s CDN. It does pretty much everything that jQuery does, plus loads pages extremely fast.

As a result, you should try removing any unnecessary scripts from your site.

8) Add HTTP/2 support

HTTP/2 is an upgrade to the standard protocol used to transfer data over the internet.

Its primary purpose is to reduce latency between client and server.

It works by splitting big blocks of information into smaller packets. These packets then travel at high speeds across the network.

The result? Websites load significantly faster.

Additionally, this new version of the protocol has been designed specifically for mobile devices. So, it will work better on smartphones and tablets.

Therefore, adding HTTP/2 support to your site would be beneficial.

Final Words

Optimising your WordPress website isn’t rocket science. However, it requires some patience and dedication. You need to understand what makes your site slow or not. Then, it would be best if you found ways to address each issue individually.

Basically, you should identify where things go wrong first, only after doing all that do you start fixing issues. So, don’t worry about making mistakes when trying to optimise your site. Just keep working hard towards improving it.