No one likes to wait for a website to load. Especially, if you are presenting your own business or yourself, you need a fast-loading website to leave a good user experience. Have you ever checked how fast your website is loading?
I did it and I was shocked. It took over 10 seconds to load, which is a total No-Go. So here is my recipe to speed up your WordPress Website.
Step 1 – Do a Speedtest
You can use the google page-speed tool or the pingdom-tool for analyzing the loading time and finding out more about the possible issues that you have. Here was my result:
You don’t understand anything?
Don’t worry, you do not have to be a developer or an IT-geek to improve your loading time. Here are my favorite plugins to raise your speed in less than one hour of work.
Step 2 – Install these plugins
1. Smush – Resizes your images
Big images/videos take a lot of loading time. And if you are a Designer, you are using tons of high-resolution pictures to present your work. This is the most popular issue for slow websites.
Go to your Plugins and search for Smush. After installing Smush, you will see it in your WordPress menu on the left side. Here, just select „Resize your Images“ and you will speed up your loading time immense. Also, I recommend activating „Lazy Load“ – this function will load images while the user is scrolling down instead of leading them all at the same time.
2. Hummingbird – Gzip-Compression & Caching
If your speed test is telling you to „compress your components with gzip“, then you should install the Hummingbird Plugin. After activating the Plugin, you go to Gzip Compression and activate it. This will compress your files, which helps to reduce the transfer time because the files that will be sent to the browser are now much smaller.
Also activating the Caching will help to speed up the page because your static HTML will be stored for the next visit.
3. Async Javascript – Eliminates Render-Blocking Resources
If this is an issue that your SpeedTest has recognized, then you will need Async Javascript. This will help to solve that issue. Without going too much into the technical details, this async process tells the website to load little by little and not to load the whole website at the same time.
After downloading the plugin, you go to Settings > Async Javascript.
- You check the box to Enable Async JavaScript
- You choose Apply Async in the Quick Settings box ( if Apply Sinc will cause a problem on your site, you can try Apply Defer instead)
Step 3 – Test again
Test with the google page-speed tool and see if there are improvements and what issues you still might have. With these 3 Plugins, I could improve my loading speed immense from 13 seconds to 2 seconds and my score went up from 33 to 80.
Other issues?
Well, every website is different and maybe you are facing other issues. However, the good thing about WordPress is that there are so many great plugins that you often can get for free. So don’t worry that you don’t understand why your site is slow and just do the research if there is a plugin that can solve your problem.
If you have any additional questions, I am happy to help you!