wordpress-speed-optimization
Reading Time: 4 minutes

The speed of the website is a critical factor for the user experience and for its positioning on search engines. In particular, for one site, WordPress, speed is even more important since it is a resource-intensive platform to work properly on.

The user experience

Website speed has a significant impact on the user experience. A slow site can increase the abandonment rate and reduce user satisfaction. Conversely, a fast site can improve user experience, increase satisfaction, and reduce churn.

Positioning on search engines

Website speed is also an important factor for positioning on search engines. Google has stated that website speed is one of the factors it uses to determine placement in search results. Also, fast websites are more likely to be shared on social media, increasing traffic and search engine rankings.

How do I optimize the speed of a website in WordPress?

Website speed is critical to user experience and search engine rankings. A fast site increases user satisfaction and reduces the abandonment rate. In this article, we will explore some techniques to optimize the speed of your WordPress website.

Choose quality hosting

The choice of hosting is crucial to ensuring the speed of your site. Choose a reliable and fast provider. Also, choose a plan for hosting that is in line with your needs. Quality hosting has powerful and reliable servers, which guarantee a fast and stable connection. Furthermore, quality hosting also offers reliable and fast technical support, which can help you in case of any problems.

Use a lightweight theme

A feature-heavy, heavy theme slows down your site. Choose a light theme and clean it to ensure maximum speed. A lightweight theme reduces page load time because it contains only what is necessary for the site to function. Additionally, a lightweight theme is also easier to customize and maintain.

Use caching plugins

Caching plugins can greatly optimize the speed of a WordPress website. These plugins create a cached version of your site that is served to users, reducing page load time. Caching plugins can be very effective for websites with static content, such as blogs or e-commerce sites. Using a caching plugin, you can reduce the page loading time of your site, improving the user experience and positioning on search engines.

Reduce the size of the images

Images are often the root cause of slow websites. Make sure you use optimized images and reduce their size as much as possible. Images can be optimized in various ways, such as compression or resolution reduction. Also, you can use online tools to reduce the size of images without losing quality.

Use the CDN

The CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers that distribute the content of your site around the world. Using the CDN, your users can access your site from servers closer to them, improving page loading speed. The CDN can be especially useful for websites with users in different parts of the world. Using the CDN, you can reduce the page load time of your site, improving the user experience and positioning on search engines.

Reduce the number of HTTP requests

The number of HTTP requests required to load a page affects site speed. Reduce the number of requests by reducing the number of files needed to load the page. You can reduce the number of HTTP requests by deleting unnecessary files or combining similar files. Additionally, you can use techniques like sprite CSS to reduce the number of HTTP requests.

Use compression

File compression can greatly reduce file size and improve upload speed. Use compression to reduce the size of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. File compression can be done using techniques such as GZIP or Brotli. File compression can reduce the loading time of your site’s pages, improving user experience and search engine rankings.

It uses HTTP/2 technology

HTTP/2 technology is a new version of the HTTP protocol that was designed to improve the loading speed of web pages. Using the HTTP/2 technology, you can reduce the loading time of your site’s pages, improving the user experience and ranking on search engines.

Conclusion

Optimizing the speed of your WordPress site takes time and effort, but the benefits are numerous. A fast site improves user experience and search engine rankings. Use these techniques to ensure maximum speed for your site. Remember that your site’s speed is an important factor in the success of your online business, so don’t overlook it.

That’s it, folks! Check out our blog for more information.

siteweb-speed
Reading Time: 4 minutes

A slow site speed not only frustrates visitors but also hinders your search ranking, making it harder for new users to find your website.

In fact, after the introduction of Google Core Web Vitals, which we already talked about a few articles ago, a slow site can be penalized by Google and therefore not be visible in the first search results.

In this article, we’ll look at some of the reasons why site speed is critical to look after.

Improving performance is good for traffic

As we anticipated, in May of 2020, Google announced that “page experience” would soon become a ranking factor in Google Search.

This update has therefore marked a significant turning point, indicating that the performance of a site is now a fundamental discriminator for the visibility of a site.

Google through Core Web Vitals determines how high a particular website should appear in search results.

Several metrics come into play. The LCP, the FID and the CLS. If these metrics are not met, Google will understand that the site is not performing and therefore will make it less visible.

By cons, that means instead faster and better-performing websites see more traffic compared to the slower competition.

In the time since the announcement, Google has continued to release more information about exactly how performance can affect rankings in search.

When it comes to organic search, a slow website will have fewer potential customers.

So, as you can see, it becomes essential to have a fast and performing website.

Improving performance is good for conversions

Once a user enters a website, the performance greatly affects his behaviour, influencing him positively or negatively.

According to a survey of over 700 consumers, nearly 70% of users said that the performance of the website they were browsing affected their likelihood of buying or returning to the website.

In fact, how many times have we found ourselves on a site, perhaps to buy a product? Well, if the site is slow, it also gives us a feeling of inadequacy and above all little reliability. Therefore, in addition to leaving it because it can be frustrating to browse it, a user leaves a site of this also because he thinks it is unsafe. It’s a question of image, if the site works well, is fast and responsive, the user feels more secure and at ease.

The speed of a site, as you can see, is a really important factor for the user experience. This element comes before a good user experience or a good structure.

Performance improvement helps visitors save mobile bandwidth

According to data collected from the HTTP archive, page sizes have increased significantly in recent years. Over the past 10 years, the average size of web pages on the desktop web has tripled.

This can cause problems for users who are sensitive to bandwidth consumption. It is true that now many offers from mobile telephone operators offer a minimum of 50 – 100GB, but still why consume more? not to mention that there are areas where the mobile connection is not stable and therefore having a site that loads slowly affects it even more.

Increasing page size may lead consumers to upgrade to larger plans and spend more on mobile data.

Improved performance reduces hosting costs

A faster website can reduce costs. Images, videos and other media uploaded to the website must be stored somewhere, often with additional backups. In addition to storage space, many cloud service providers also charge for outbound bandwidth when users request a file from your servers.

In practice, the same kind of image optimization that benefits things like Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift can also reduce the amount of storage space required to house these assets.

A study by CrayonData found that not only optimizing images and uploading them via a CDN has reduced storage costs, but it has also reduced network consumption. This resulted in an 85% reduction in hosting costs, saving over $200,000.

So as you can see, you can save a lot in this sense too.

Do I need to improve the speed of my site?

Well, improving the speed of the website can give you advantages in terms of conversions and costs. A fast website can boost organic traffic, conversion rates, and sales.

Making a website faster for users can require consensus from stakeholders across all teams. It can require you to make difficult decisions about features, functionality, and aesthetics that impact performance. Organizationally, the additional design time and resources required may also require management approval.

Despite these challenges, a fast website has the potential to be discovered and engaged by more users, especially if it’s faster than its competitors. Once users find the website, they are also more likely to interact with it in more depth and eventually convert into customers.

That’s it, folks! Check out our blog for more information.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

With the rapid evolution of technology especially in this very sensitive time, when there is an ongoing pandemic, online shopping has become the preferred way of shopping for most shoppers. However, even as e-commerce owners strain every effort to reduce page load times and improve the speed of Magento, ensuring high and stable website performance remains a challenging task. 

Web performance has a crucial impact on numerous aspects, including customer satisfaction, conversion rates, search engine rankings and, consequently, economic results. Customers will not purchase from a bug-ridden, slow-moving web store.

According to statistics, 47% of online shoppers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. And if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 40% of all customers will leave. Therefore, maintaining a fast and easy-to-access website is a top priority for Magento e-commerce owners.

In this way, you can provide an optimal user experience and make sure to greatly reduce the notorious effect of cart abandonment. In this article, we will share 4 very effective, yet simple tools for measuring and optimizing the speed of Magento performance.

But first, let’s start with an overview of why Magento can run slowly …

Why can Magento’s performance be slow?

There are many reasons to choose Magento over other e-commerce platforms, but besides the positives, there are also some concerns. Magento is considered to be a resource-consuming system and therefore it is quite slow. Numerous complaints about Magento’s performance are found around the web.

But let’s see what can actually affect the speed of a Magento site so crucially.

Unsuitable hosting

In most cases, those who own an E-commerce, tend to reduce expenses to a minimum, especially if the business is starting. Also, you might think that the store traffic is pretty even and thus ignore the fact that most sales are usually done during peak hours.

This is why an e-vendor is likely to choose a server with default settings and low productivity. Unfortunately, these settings don’t get along very well with Magento. Sometimes hosting platforms aren’t scalable enough to meet needs as an e-commerce business grows. As a result, the Magento site is hosted on a server with improper software and hardware.

Strong increase in traffic

As the website starts generating sales and traffic, this problem is further compounded. A reseller tries their best to generate more sales by using various marketing and SEO tools. However, the increase in traffic could easily lead to a server crash if the server is not configured correctly. Then the sales stop altogether until the server is up again. The slow server during traffic spikes causes a huge increase in the bounce rate.

internet-traffic-increase

So here’s the paradox: The more traffic these stores get, the fewer sales they will eventually have. This is evident: customers are looking for a stable and fast shop. Additionally, the slow speed and unavailability of the site lower the store’s Google page ranking, which negates the store owner’s marketing and SEO efforts.

Too many extensions

Here is another problem to consider: due to numerous extensions installed and/or improper server settings very often the Magento back end turns out to be even slower than the front end. It greatly increases the time taken by the admin to manage the store. Frustrating, isn’t it? Magento was designed to be extensible and to serve any user, even the most demanding. To deal with this, the system isolates each functionality so that changing that functionality does not affect the rest of Magento. As a result, many files are read in thousands of folders for every web store visitor. So, in a way, Magento’s better quality (flexibility) causes its main drawback: slow performance. 

4 tools to measure and optimize the speed of Magento

hosting-fast-tool

 

Speed ​​Hostgento

tool-speed-hostgento

With our application, you can simply check if your Magento is slow. Check the Google Page Speed ​​score and check the performance of your site.

Not only!

You can also request a 1-month free trial for your Magento hosting, which is secure, optimized and fast!

>> Test 

Page Speed ​​Insight

speed-google

By uploading the URL on this site, you can check the problems related to the speed of your store. You will be provided with an analysis of the criticalities of your store, in terms of performance.

>> Test 

GTmetrics

gtmetrics-speed

How fast does your site load? You can find out with this tool. You will be able to see the performance of your store, understand why the site presents problems and see what are the optimization possibilities.

>> Test 

Solarwind – Pingdom

pingdon-speed

Analyze the loading speeds of your websites and find out how to make them faster. The Website Speed ​​Test allows you to identify what’s fast, slow, too big on a webpage, what best practices you’re not following, and so much more.

>> Test 

Conclusions

Undoubtedly, web store loading speed will remain one of the most important factors influencing conversion rates and SEO rankings in the e-commerce industry. We hope our suggestions will help you speed up the performance of your Magento store, resulting in better user experience and customer loyalty.

And if you need optimized, secure and performing hosting, contact us!

That’s it, folks! Check out our blog for more information.

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