Why to speed up websites ? WordPress optimization tips

To improve website performance it matters to speed up websites as a WordPress optimization strategy

You live in a world today that is defined by speed. Every aspect of life has this factor deeply imbibed into it. Say you are shopping online and you come across two similar products with the same price. The only difference between the two transactions is, one product takes a month to reach you and the other takes a week. It is obvious that you are going to go for the latter.

Human mind is fickle. It jumps from one idea to another very quickly. The more the time an idea takes to undergo inception, more reluctant is the human brain in accepting it. People look for fast easy services in every sphere. Be it a simple pizza delivery or the page load speed on the Internet.

The digital world is overtaking the physical realm. People are relying on the Internet for almost all commodities and necessities in life. Be it buying new clothes for Christmas or helping your child do his or her homework assignment. As a result of this development, the digital franchise is becoming more and more profitable every day. Web and app developers are investing more time, money and intelligence into their brainchild.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is one of the most important factors considered by web developers today. It is like the Gospel of Digital World Order. In simple terms, SEO is the process that affects the visibility of a particular website in a web search engine like Google. Since this commodity is free, it’s referred to as ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ optimization. There are many factors that affect the SEO of a particular web page. Some of them are keyword optimization, Google AdWords, backlinks, internal links and so on. The latest update in the SEO marketing is page speed.

Why to speed up websites?

Page speed has not always been a part of the SEO strategy until recently. Web developers and IT technicians have realized how important the speed of loading of a particular website can affect the SEO and the user experience. Say you have started a venture. It involves an online questionnaire for sophomores to determine what career path is most suited for them. Now there are many similar websites out there that undertake the same or almost similar functions. How do you ensure that there is more traffic in your website rather than the rival ones? Well there are default SEO techniques that could help your website receive a higher ‘organic’ ranking in the search results. Nevertheless, this alone is no longer the guiding factor.

If your website is particularly slow to load, the user will bounce off your website and move on to the next one. As a result of this the user traffic in your website will go down gradually. This will in turn affect the SEO of your website. It has been seen that if the traffic of a website goes down, the ranking is pushed down as well. This could be really bad for your business as it would mean your marketing strategies are failing. So WordPress optimization is a major aspect that all business owners and site developers must keep in mind in order to keep the traffic flowing.

Why are websites slow?

A basic HTML page takes about a 2-3 seconds to load and a more complex page can take up to 5-6 seconds. This is the standard speed of most networks. But sometimes the time taken for the website is a lot longer than stipulated. This can have many reasons behind it.

The first and foremost reason can be that your server is slow. In such a case you should look for a different service. The second reason is the network connection to the server is slow or slow at one of the ‘hops’ between the server and your location. This problem can be sorted out by running a trace route between your location and the server and identify all the ‘hops’. You can take your actions accordingly.

A third reason can be because your website has too less optimization of content. A web page is made up of several components from Flash files to texts to audio to video to links leading to a hundred other websites. If proper compression and WordPress optimization is done, it will speed up websites.

Get your page speed score now!

Google has devised a metric that will help you determine the speed of loading of your web page. This is called the Page Speed Score. It is a score between 0-100. It was devised keeping in mind the data assimilation speed in mobile and computer web pages. The higher your web page scores, more is the speed.

Need to test how optimised your website is? The score is also provided by a Google tool called Page Speed Insights. It gives you concise and necessary information regarding your website speed optimization. So if your web page scores about 85 or above, this means your web page has a pretty good loading speed. The greatest aspect of Google Page speed score is its transparency. This tool will help you in devising proper WordPress optimization techniques. You can also rely on these tools GTmetrix , Pingdom.

WordPress optimization for a website is a part of its SEO strategy

SEO as mentioned earlier helps in improving the visibility of a particular website in search engine results. There are many techniques and strategies that are undertaken under this head to push up a websites ranking and thereby improve its visibility. In spite of all the technicalities and features, SEO is about how comfortable the user is with the website.

Matt Cutts, an American software engineer and the former head of the web spam team at Google has said “Digital marketers should think of SEO as being Search Experience Optimization”. This statement is 100% true and website speed is a major factor in determining user experience. If a page is slow to load, the user will move on to another website. More and more users will do the same. This will reduce the traffic and thereby ranking of your website in the results. This will in turn affect the business and reduce the revenue.

So it is vital for web developers and business owners to keep this aspect of SEO in mind.

How Page Speed Affects Indexation, Traffic & Rankings?

Before going into details one needs to understand how Google actually works while assessing your website. There are two technical terms every person in this sphere should know about- crawling and indexing.

Crawling is the process of following a path. Google uses bots called Spider Crawlers to track and assess your website data and follow the links to other websites. On the basis of crawling, Google undertakes indexation. Indexation is the process of adding a web page to the search result. A robot.txt is a file created by Webmasters to instruct the robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl and index the pages on their website. This robots.txt file should be added in the top-level directory of your web server.

Page speed plays a major role in indexation, traffic and ranking of your web page. When Google spiders cannot crawl your site for some time, rankings associated with the keywords of the inaccessible pages will suffer. There will be lesser number of users in your web page and thereby reduce your ranking.

So it is vital that you have improved WordPress optimization website unless you want a drastic fall in your turnover. Hansoftech’s WordPress speed optimization team is here to help you to improve your Page speed and draw the attention of more customers.

Checklist for WordPress optimization to speed up website

Now that one has established the need to speed up websites, one has to move on to the know-how. There are many techniques and processes to reduce the loading time of a website. Here is a list of some of the steps you can follow to drastically increase WordPress optimization.

• Minimize HTTP Requests
• Reduce server response time
• Enable compression
• Enable browser caching
• Minify Resources
• Optimize images
• Optimize CSS Delivery
• Prioritize above-the-fold content
• Reduce the number of plugins you use on your site
• Reduce redirects

These are some of the basic techniques one can follow for any website speed optimization or WordPress optimization that promises above satisfactory user experience. Though we know we can use a CDN to improvise the server response time of existing websites, it is always good to choose the right hosting if it is a new website. Also the uptime of a hosting server plays a major role in customer retention. Here is a good piece of analysis of the hosts in US based on its performance.

Benefits of website speed optimization

SEO marketing strategies and the genius minds of some developers have made the digital world a dreamland. Ranking, white hat techniques and traffic are important guiding factors that have made the Internet the better and safer place to ‘reside’. Page speed has been incorporated into the equation for a more complacent search. Google has indicated that page speed has been imbibed into the algorithm to determine the ranking of a particular website.

Nobody likes a slow loading page. Internet users are fickle creatures. They have a tendency to move on very easily. It has been seen that a particular user will not stay on a website that takes more than 3-4 seconds to load. As a result of this, most website developers are concerning themselves on ways to speed up WordPress site or do WordPress optimization the time of developing itself. Bloggers and business owners have invested a lot of money and technology in order to increase their WordPress website optimization and performance.

Whether you want to speed up WordPress for your fellow readers or speed up your business website for increased transactions, there are now several ways to do the same. The users of today rely on three vital premises when choosing a particular website out of the millions available out there. Quality, Quantity and Time. Get in touch with WP Speed experts for a custom website speed optimization services. Focus to speed up your website as a website performance optimization strategy!