In this article, you will learn 10 important factors that affect website speed. Optimizing these factors can increase the page load time, which is a signal of good ranking.
Introduction
WordPress is the most widely used content management system (CMS). One of the reasons it is so popular is its ease of use. You don’t need to be a programmer to build a website using the WordPress CMS. In this tutorial, you will learn how to speed up your WordPress website. Web page speed is essential for the best user experience. The speed of the WordPress website depends on many things and has a good effect on the overall SEO. According to Google, two pages with all other factors similar but faster will have a better ranking. Most of the visitors don’t even arrive at the website if it takes more time to load. Keeping the importance of speed factors in mind, many website owners are implementing the AMP version of their websites. You will notice a considerable reduction in load time if you study this tutorial with due attention.
Let’s now discuss all the factors that affect website speed. All these factors are equally important and contribute to reducing page load time. We will explain it with practical examples. The site we have considered for practically implementing these steps is https://gctswabi.com. This website does not fulfill all the requirements, but still, you will see a dramatic change in page speed. For example, this is on shared hosting with no CDN, and LazyLoad images are not applied. You can see in the following pictures that its speed is very less both on GTmetrix and Google Page Speed.
Good Host
Hosting is one of the most important factors that affect website speed. The hosting company and the plan both contribute a lot to web page speed. The test website in this tutorial is itself on shared hosting, but it will be shifted to VPS soon when traffic increases. It is a new website and has had less traffic until now. Shared hosting will not help you if website visitors are large. Besides hosting plans, hosting providers also contribute a lot to reducing page load time. Many hosting providers claim to provide SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, etc., but their servers become irresponsive when the number of active users on-site increases.
Good Theme
A good theme is also one of the important factors that affect website speed. The theme also makes a considerable contribution to WordPress page speed. A theme with a lot of functionalities and animations loads slower than one with a neat and straightforward design. Before purchasing a theme, check its page size and load time. Every theme provides a link to its demo page. Copy that demo link and paste it into Google Page Speed or GTmetrix. Only purchase those themes that load faster and have a smaller page size.
Resize and Compress Images
The size of images and their compression both are important factors that affect website speed. You should not upload large file sizes to a website. An image with a large dimension is good for printing purposes, but it ruins the speed of the website. For example, if an image is 2400 x 5000 pixels and you need only 400 x 400 pixels, you must resize it prior to uploading. Images should be resized using an image editing tool like Photoshop. You should not use HTML code to resize images with max width and height attributes, as the actual image size does not change with it.
Image optimization also has a massive effect on page load time. We, therefore, recommended compressing all images before uploading. There is an online tool that I use for image compression called Short Pixel. If you have already uploaded images to your website, then you will have to use their plugin to compress all your pictures. It has some pricing plans, but the free version also works for most of the users. The free image compression quota is 100 images per month. You can also buy one-time image compression.
Cache Plugin
A cache is a temporary storage of assets for quick access when requested. This cache concept on websites is similar to the one used on computers. Cache improves website performance and load time. WordPress is a dynamic CMS, so it contacts the database each time a visitor requests a resource. It slows down the overall page speed, especially when the large number of users visiting your website increases at the same time. Cache plugins make a copy of the webpage when it loads for the first time in a visitor’s browser. Then it offers the identical copy for subsequent visits by the same user. The page load time thus increases significantly.
Caching static resources like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS also reduces page load time. There are many WordPress cache plugins available on the WordPress repository, but the most familiar cache plugin is W3 Total Cache. Besides this, WP Super Cache and WP Rocket are also very common to use.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDN is also an important factor that plays a vital role in decreasing page load time. The Content Delivery Network (CDN) also increases WordPress page speed. It is a collection of distributed servers that offer static resources on a website to users based on their location. This CDN is vital for sites with more traffic. There are different plans for using a content delivery network on your website. The choice of a particular plan depends on the monthly page views of your website. As we have distributed servers in CDN, the server nearer to the visitor offers him static resources of your site like CSS, JavaScript, and images.
Home Page Optimization
If you have addressed the user query efficiently, he will most probably jump to the home page after reading your article. We, therefore, recommend paying particular attention to the load time of the home page of your site. The following steps can help to optimize the home page for better user experience and performance.
- Show only the summary on the home page and not the full post
- Remove sharing and other unwanted widgets from the home page.
Keep a minimal number of posts on the homepage
Optimized WP Database
There are a lot of database tables that you no longer need. When you uninstall a Plugin, its tables remain in the database. Besides database tables, there are post revisions, drafts, etc., which make your database load slowly. Fortunately, there is a WordPress plugin (WP-Optimize), which makes the process simple. It is highly recommended to back up your database before using this plugin. Because a table once deleted cannot be restored if you have not taken a backup of your WordPress database. You should also remove the tables, recommended by the Plugin for deletion, with great care.
Add expiration headers
Expire headers tell the browser how long to store static resources in a local cache so that they can be served upon subsequent requests. The visitor’s browser downloads the files again when the headers are expired. This value should be set depending on how often you make changes to CSS, JavaScript, etc. You should set short expiration header values for things that you change frequently and set large values for expiring headers for items you change after a long time. You can specify file type and format in expire headers. Look at the following examples
# Images
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/webp “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/svg+xml “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access plus 1 year”
# Video
ExpiresByType video/mp4 “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType video/mpeg “access plus 1 year”
# CSS, JavaScript
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 1 month”
ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/javascript “access plus 1 month”
LazyLoad Images
LazyLoad images are displayed only when they are needed. The webpage shows images above the fold only and displays other images upon scrolling. The browsers don’t need to wait for all the elements on the page; hence the speed of the page increases. If we don’t apply LazyLoad, the webpage will wait for all the images to download, and the page will not be fully functional until the images are downloaded. With LazyLoad, the webpage does not wait for image downloads to be functional. When the reader scrolls down the page, the original image is not visible at the start. Instead, a placeholder is displayed on the page; this placeholder gets replaced by the original image when it comes to the viewport. The process of lazy loading, therefore, improves the overall performance of the page significantly.
W3 Total Cache has now included an option for LazyLoading images. A separate Plugin is also available which can be downloaded from the WordPress repository but it is recommended to use the option in W3 Total Cache instead of using a separate Plugin.
Use Cloudflare
Cloudflare also provides the same functionality as CDN. If you have not used CDN, it is recommended to use Cloudflare. Cloudflare is free, and it also has some paid features. Another good thing is that it can be integrated into the W3 Total cache, and the combination gives astonishing results.
Look at the results after applying these steps. I have not used CDN, a shared hosting but still, I got tremendous improvements as apparent from the following screenshot.
Conclusion
These are all the factors that affect website speed. The most widely used content management system (CMS) is WordPress, which is renowned for its user-friendliness and accessibility to non-programmers. You learned WordPress website performance optimization, which is essential for a first-rate user experience and SEO. Google emphasizes how quickly a website load affects rankings, and slow-loading pages turn away users. To increase speed, many website owners are switching to AMP versions. The course gives concrete examples as well as a breakdown of the many elements affecting load times. Implementing these methods on a test site, gctswabi.com, results in noticeable speed increases even in the absence of ideal circumstances like shared hosting and the absence of LazyLoad images. Quality of the hosting service, theme selection, picture resizing and compression, plugins for caching, Content Delivery Networks (CDN), homepage optimization, database cleanup, expiration headers, and LazyLoad images are among the factors to be taken into account.
