Does Website Speed Matter? Here's How You Can Make Your WordPress Site Faster than Before!

The way you can impress viewers with your website on the first occasion leaves a lasting impression in their minds. The first chance is always your best chance to win over an audience. To make a mark on your very first appearance, you must find out the easiest way of reaching the hearts of viewers who enjoy viewing speedy websites. How fast a web page opens in front of viewers is a major factor in liking sites. If a site is slow, visitors will reject it outright because they would give you as little as two seconds for opening a web page. On the contrary, websites that are fast and meet viewer expectations pass the test easily.

Smartness, efficiency, trust, and reliability merge into one when it comes to website speed. A fast loading website automatically acquires all these attributes even without any verification because viewers equate speed with these attributes. Whether it is logical or not is a matter that is likely to lead to debate, but there is no denying that it happens that way. When website pages load fast, viewers derive confidence from the site and look upon it as smart and high performing. Search engines love speedy websites because site speed is a factor that search algorithms take into account during search rankings. In this article, we will discuss how to augment the speed of WordPress websites.

Prefer to display excerpts

The SEO professionals of Sin City points out that when using WordPress sites, you have the option of presenting the full content of archives and the home page, or you can show excerpts only. By viewing the tip of the content, viewers would find a reason to go through the entire content.  Since excerpts load faster than the full content, to achieve higher website speed, it makes sense to use it intelligently.  The WordPress editor has the ‘Read More’ tag that helps to create excerpts by manually selecting the cut-off points in the content. When viewers go through the excerpts and feel like viewing the full content, they can click on the ‘Read More’ tag that opens the complete content on the screen.

Since doing the same process of creating excerpts for all pages takes time, you can speed it up by using the automated option for curating the content in the way you want.  You can trim the content down to 55 words by using the ‘Summary’ option while clicking on the ‘Full Text’ option will display the complete content.

Shrink the images

One of the reasons for slow websites is large images that take a longer time to load. Having too many large images is a taboo if you want to speed up the site. Cutting down on the number of images is one way of making websites speedier, but it might still not make you happy. Does this mean that you need to do away with images altogether whereas it might be essential for the content?  To find a solution to this, besides limiting the number of images on websites to the extent possible, you can compress the images so that it occupies less space and takes less time to load.  With WordPress, the task of compressing images is easy because there are plenty of plugins available that can do the task conveniently and fast and compress images up to 70 percent. Different plugins perform various functions of compressing images either by stripping Metadata from images without affecting the resolution or removing unused colors from images.

Bring down the number of HTTP requests

Reducing the number of objects on a web page is one of the ways of boosting the website speed. To understand how it happens, you must know about HTTP request generation that occurs with the opening of each web page. Whenever a web page opens, the CSS files, Javascript library and image files pertaining to the page transmit to the browser of the viewer by generating several HTTP requests and this contributes to the page loading time. When you reduce the number of objects on the web page, it would consequently lessen the number of HTTP requests generated during page opening and would, in turn, load the page faster. Think about simplifying the web design or combining CSS and scripts, which also gives good results.

Database table optimization

An easy way to increase website speed is to optimize the WordPress database tables to increase free space that aids faster loading of websites. Reducing the number of queries to the database is one way of doing it while using a plugin to optimize the database tables manually or doing it by using phpMyAdmin are other ways that you can do it.

All these methods are easy to implement and when done correctly you will experience significant improvement in website load