So you want your WordPress website to be fast, but why?
Consider how you are when you visit a website that is too slow. If a website is not fast enough, you are going to get bored and go elsewhere.
That is why your WordPress website speed is so vitally important.
If your WordPress website is not fast enough, people will not wait for it. They will turn on their heels and go elsewhere. In analytics terms, this will help give you a high bounce rate – not a good thing!
And, too make things worse, it is not just your visitors that will penalise you, Google will penalise you too.
Google knows that you will not enjoy a slow website. That equates to a bad user experience. And Google is all about user experience for its search engine rankings.
So, without a fast WordPress website, you will likely drop down the search results. You might find yourself underneath your competitors, if your website is slower than theirs – that’s bad for business growth!
My Website Audit Tool
In the Speed audit of my Website Audit Tool, I test your website with Google PageSpeed Insights.
Google PageSpeed Insights is Google’s website analyser tool. It uses tests across several metrics to produce a score benchmarked against top tier sites.
For this test specifically, your score from Google is created after running 6 different tests.
How to score well
Getting a perfect 100% score on Google PageSpeed Insights is no easy task.
But it is worth the effort.
It will bring you more visitors, more clients and in turn, grow your business.
Implement these 4 solutions on your WordPress website. Then come back and test your site on my Website Audit Tool again. You should find that you score a lot higher.
1. Compress your images
Compressing your images will usually make your WordPress website faster. It is typically the single biggest action you can take.
What compression does is use algorithms to reduce the size (i.e. disk space in MB, KB etc) of images. Your images look the same, they are just smaller.
On WordPress, you have many plugins that will compress your website images for you.
But my recommendation is Smush. It is completely free and it will compress all your website images in batches of 50.
2. Use browser caching
You can also use use browser caching to make your WordPress website faster.
With browser caching, you are saying to website visitors that they can store a local copy (cache) of website files. So the next time they visit, they don’t have to download it again.
It can be used for all websites files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images etc). You can also specify how long the cache should last for.
On WordPress, you can get a plugin for free that will setup the caching for you.
My favourite is Hummingbird. It has a wizard so that you can get results quickly, and advanced settings for bespoke customisation. You can even connect it to Cloudflare.
3. Minify your HTML
When developers write HTML code (the code used to create webpages), they write it with spaces, tabs and line breaks.
By minifying your website HTML code, you are stripping-out all of these superfluous characters. Web browsers do not need these extra characters, they are simply for presentation.
That will give you an HTML file that is smaller in size (MB or KB) and faster to load. And you can apply the same principle to all website text files (i.e. CSS and JavaScript).
Usually, the same plugin you choose for browser caching (above) will take care of minifying as well. That is why I recommend the Hummingbird plugin for WordPress. Hummingbird is an all in one solution for making your WordPress website faster.
4. Implement AMP
AMP is another way to make your WordPress website faster.
AMP pages are Accelerated Mobile Pages. And with AMP, you are creating a duplicate version of a webpage. A version that exists to serve users of mobiles only.
It is a stripped-down, bare bones version of it’s original. It contains only what is necessary for showing the page content. You will usually find it used for blog articles, news or current affairs. That’s why you see it from the likes of the BBC and The Guardian all the time.
On WordPress, I recommend you use the AMP for WP plugin. It is recognised to be the best way to have AMP for your WordPress site.
Conclusion
So, what do you think about my Website Audit Tool? Do you think it has enough speed tests for WordPress websites?
I know I haven’t talked about the Website Audit Tool before, but I’ve been working on it in the background for a while. And I really hope to bring you a valuable tool that will help your business grow.
A feature of this tool is to show you a cached report for a website if it exists. By doing this, I avoid running my tests on your website every time, and creating any extra impact on resources. It also enables me to show you the results much quicker.
Give the Website Audit Tool a try and let me know what you think.