Are you aware that your website is slow? Is the lag in your website costing you your customers? Does it limit your chance of obtaining the maximum conversion rate?
If you answered ‘Yes’ to all the questions above, this is the perfect post for you to read to make sure you correct your mistakes that are the 3 most common reasons why your word press website is slow.
A survey done by strange loop suggests that just a delay of a second in loading the desired page leads to a 7% loss in conversion! The reason behind this is the science of human attention span which is in between just 3-7 seconds only.
We all face load time issues with our websites but shifting the entire webpage to another platform is not the solution! We need to get our basics right.
The 3 reasons why your WordPress webpage is slow are quite simple. So are the ways to correct these mistakes. Do you just need to identify if you made the following errors?
1. Unoptimized Images
Did you know that large images are a threat to your website’s loading speed? The larger the image, the more strain it causes on the webpage to load.
Therefore, the largest image featured on your website should not be more than 100 kb, and try to make use of lazy loading. A pro tip is to make sure your product images are in between 8-12 kb’s only.
2. Hosting Matters
It’s a very common mistake by websites on WordPress that is greatly responsible for a lag in the loading of the web page, yet people forget to host their sites somewhere near the country.
Ironically some sites are hosted in phoenix which is the worst place to host the website. Instead, websites should be hosted somewhere near Pakistan like Singapore or Ireland.
AWS is another great solution to this problem, yet its complexity is still alarming. Using a digital ocean or WP engine is a much viable option and is highly recommended.
3. Too many Plugins
Apparently, there is a thing as too many plugins! Yes, it might not have seemed to be a huge issue, however, let me assure you that having several plugins installed is also one of the 3 main reasons for your word press website being slow.
However, in the case of too many plugins, fear not. Just make sure you switch off the ones not in use in order to save the draining of your website’s speed. Furthermore, several word press websites use WPRocket and make use of a better CDN like Cloudflare. And well there are many tools available to speed test your website, using them wisely can guarantee a faster website.
4. Direct Video Uploads
You may not be aware but directly uploading videos and audios on your website on WordPress can eat up the web page loading speed tremendously.
Never upload such files directly, instead use an audio/video hosting service like Youtube or Vimeo and let them take care of the bandwidth.
SOURCE: EVALUATED SOME WEBSITES ON BUILTWITH.COM AND SIMILARWEB.COM BY FOR REFERENCE: MEHWISH ASLAM
