5 Performance Tips you need for your WordPress website

It is fairly common knowledge that performance and speed are vital to your websites conversion rates. No-one in 2021 is waiting for your website to load. Nobody has the patience. At the same time, you know no-one is going to read a page of text - it needs to contain images and code the controls layout and style (css) and extra functionalities (javascript) - especially if you're running an E-Commerce business!

So how do we marry have a beautiful, high functioning website, with speed and performance for your end user?

Pick a lightweight theme

WordPress has a reputation for being a bloated, slow system. Whether you think that's fair or not depends on where you stand in the developer world, whether you care or not depends on how your website performs! What's not up for debate is that putting a poorly made, bloated theme on top of WordPress, is a recipe for a slow website. Pick your theme from a reputable source (themeforest.net is a good one) and pay attention to the ratings and reviews. Bonus points here for developer support - some themes offer 12 months support.

Minimise your Plugins

Extending WordPress' functionality is one of the coolest aspects of using it. Developers around the world have developed countless ways of making WordPress work for them. However, as with themes, some can be poorly built, and add unnecessary bloat to your website. Choose your plugins carefully, and think before you add - do you really need that feature? Or is there a more simple way of doing something that won't bloat your website.

Check your Hosting

Before moving my hosting, and making some other small changes to my own WordPress website, I was hitting scores in the 60's for performance. After, I was in the mid to high 90's! It's no coincidence that I now offer my own hosting services to clients, who get the best results. It can really make all the difference and be the best investment you made in your website. Adding this to a great caching policy can work wonders for your site.

Optimise your Images

Probably the most important thing on this list. Clients often give me multiple images to use on every single page. A lot of clients want a 5 slide carousel at the top of their home page. If i did nothing with these images, I'd be putting images up to 4 times the size of the average screen and up to 10mb on the page. Times that by 5, and that's just in one section!! Now multiply that by a whole website...

Optimising images is the best thing you can do for your site, including making them the right size, and stripping meta data from the files. I am for my biggest images to be no bigger than 500kb, and to be honest i think that's pushing it.

Be Wise with Google Fonts

While using Google Fonts is a great way to bring unrivalled customisation to your website, you should be know it can reduce the speed of your site.

To avoid this, pre-load the Google Fonts to optimize your website for speed. Host your Google Fonts on your web server, rather than making calls through javascript and css. The fewer requests you make, the quicker your site will run.

Bonus Tip: Let us do it for you

We can do all the above for your website, and a whole lot more. Let us increase your performance scores, and bring you more custom as a result. Interested? Use the form below to get in touch