WordPress is the most used platform for blogging and CMS websites as it clocked 59.2% share of total market share for such CMS websites. Everyone just love it due to it’s ease of use. Right from individual bloggers to the top sites of the world like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy , Forbes etc are using the platform. So, wordpress is most loved platform but it also has got some limitation like “Slow loading Speed” if it is not handled with care and expertise. But if you keep few important things in mind while developing or getting developed your website from a WordPress developer, you can avoid these hassles.

A sluggish website might cause trouble for your visitors and may ruined your Brands first impression which lead to the loss of visitors or business.

5 Keys for WordPress Website Speed Optimisation

Website speed does wonders to your website but it may lead to all hell broke on your website if not designer properly. As per the report by Microsoft Bing Search team 2 seconds delay reduces the customer satisfaction by 4.3% and any further delay may lead to loss of the customers.

You can check the speed of your website by using tools like Google Insight , Pingdom etc

1. Don’t use too many plugins:

Plugins have made wordpress most loved platform because of the ease to use and speeding up overall development process of website that lead to reduction of overall cost of the website.

But every blessing comes with some conditions. Sometimes developers end up using too many plugins and things get worse when plugins within plugins are being used.

So, you need to go through your all the plugins and their usability, update the dated one to the latest version, remove the redundant and useless ones. You can also check the performance by “Plugin Performance Profiler”. Take caution or a wordpress Expert help is recommended as the process may break your website if not correctly done.

2. Suffering ‘Have it all” syndrome on Home Page:

The user has few seconds to make opinion about your website and brand. Your home page serves as the entrance to your website. Keep it less cluttered, easy to carry your idea to user and must load as fast as possible.

Some “DO’s” for home page:

• Keep it simple and minimal
• Use as lesser as widgets you can
• Use optimised images
• Remove useless and dated plugins
• Don’t use unnecessary JQuery and Flash animation. They slow down the website.

3. Minify CSS, JavaScript etc:

As a WordPress developer you have to be very cautious while designing a WordPress website. Here are the some steps to optimise the performance of the websites:

• Minify JavaScript
• Compress JavaScript / Gzip
• Combine JavaScript
• Use CDN Hosted Libraries
• Inline Critical JavaScript
• Defer loading
• Defer parsing
• Leverage browser caching
• Leverage proxy caching
• Place JS at the end of page
• Minify CSS

4. Attention! Fond of high resolution Images?

As they say ‘One Picture Worth Ten Thousand Words’, couldn’t agree more but you have to learn them using it strategically, so they do not slow down the website. Before uploading them to your website, you need to optimise them to reduce their size. There are lots of Free Image Optimisation sites which can be used for the purpose.

5. Host must support the most

If you are opting for a Free or cheapest web hosting, it may hurt your website speed and overall performance badly. You have to choose a web hosting cautiously. There are many good hosting companies like Bluehost, Justhost etc available those providing economical WordPress hosting solutions as cheap as $4-$8 per month. You can compare and purchase most suitable one suiting to your budget with good performance.

Your website has few seconds to impress your visitor. Your website has to very cleanly designed and loads faster within 2-4 seconds. SEO Optimisation must be done to make it Search Engines friendly. Don’t know? Take help of SEO Services company. A slow website might have negative effects on your business specially if your are an SME business by turning away your customer.