When someone visits your website, they expect it to load right away. Few people will wait more than a few seconds for a page to appear or a video to start, especially on a phone.
A fast website keeps visitors around, makes a better first impression and is one of the many things search engines consider when ranking pages. Here’s a checklist to help make sure your site is up to speed.
Test your speed
Start by finding out where you stand. Run your homepage through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool and look at the mobile score, since most visitors are on phones. The report also points out what’s slowing your site down. (It’s one of the steps in our yearly website checkup.)
Images
Large images are one of the most common reasons websites load slowly. Make sure every image is sized for how it’s actually shown on the page, and saved in a modern format like WebP, which is much smaller than older formats. An image optimization plugin can compress and convert your images automatically, so you don’t have to think about it.
Text and fonts
You might not think text can slow down your website, but fonts can. Every custom font and weight your site uses has to be downloaded. Using fewer fonts, and hosting them on your own website instead of pulling them from another service, can make a noticeable difference.
Videos
Videos can be a major drag on speed, especially large ones hosted on your own site. Host them on a service like YouTube or Vimeo instead, and set them to load only when someone clicks play. This “lazy loading” keeps videos from slowing down the rest of the page.
Caching
Caching saves ready-made copies of your pages, so your server doesn’t have to build each page from scratch every time someone visits. It’s one of the simplest ways to make a WordPress site faster.
A content delivery network
A content delivery network (CDN), like Cloudflare, stores copies of your website’s files in locations around the world and delivers them from the one closest to each visitor. That means shorter trips and faster load times.
Hosting
Your web host plays a big role in how fast your site loads. Cheap shared hosting might save a little money, but it can slow your site down. A specialized hosting and maintenance service, like ours, tunes its servers specifically to make websites load quickly.
A lightweight foundation
How your website is built matters, too. Heavy page builders and bloated themes load lots of extra code on every page. A lightweight theme built for the WordPress block editor keeps things lean and fast from the start.
Clean up
Small things add up. Too many plugins can weigh your site down, so review the ones you have and remove any you don’t need. The less your website has to do, the faster it will be for your visitors.
A fast website is especially important on phones, where connections can be slower. (Here’s why your website still needs to be mobile-friendly.) Follow these tips, and your visitors will enjoy a quick, smooth experience every time.
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