You must have heard that first impression is the last impression and when it comes to your website it is not your homepage which is the first impression, it’s your website loading speed. Yes, it is very important to have a nice layout, proper functioning and all other good stuff to make your website appealing and attractive to customers. However, before all that is loaded and even gets a chance to impress the visitor they might leave if the loading time is slow. According to a research, 40% of the people leave the website before loading if it takes more than 3 seconds. And this gets even worse if they have been directed from another website to your website via a link.
If you have an eCommerce site, then decrease the loading time of pages should be of utmost importance to you. It has been found that 80% of the shoppers will never buy from a site again if the site’s performance is low. Furthermore, the slow loading speed of the website not only affects the customer, but also your website’s SEO because Google has now added speed of the site in its ranking algorithm. This means if the speed of your website is slow you will not only lose visitors due to the loading time but also you will lose ranking in Search engines. Here are some simple ways to increase your WordPress website speed and help it grow.
Use better Caching Plugin
All of WordPress Plugins are quite useful, but you should know that the best Plugins fall under caching category. The main reason is how they improve the loading time of pages and the best part is all of them are completely free to use. The best of them all is W3 Total Cache, if you have this plugin installed you won’t be needing any other plugin. It will provide all the required features and its installation and use is also quite easy. After activating, you will be able to see how your pages will load faster.
Compress all Images on your Website (Automatically)
When you will reduce the total size of an image on your website, it will obviously take less time to load and in return your pages will load faster. There are many ways to manually reduce the size of an image without reducing quality like Smush.it by Yahoo. However, it is better to do this automatically and for this purpose WP-SmushIt is the right plugin to get the job done. All your images will be automatically be compressed whenever you will load them.
Optimize your Homepage
Here are some ways to make your Homepage load quickly.
Use LazyLoad for Images
LazyLoad means showing only the images which are currently being shown to the user in their browser, instead of loading all images on the pages. When the user scrolls down the next images will load. This will help speed up your page load time and also save Bandwidth of the user who don’t like to scroll down to the bottom.[/md_text]
