Google loves the websites which loads fast and quickly than others taking too much time and you might know it is one of the 200 ranking factors which Google uses to assign search rankings. So, it’s pretty clear that you should try your best to make your site fast enough to render with 2 seconds or 3 seconds maximum.
According to a survey, 40% users leave a website which take more than 3 seconds to load. Now, the questions is how you can do it and achieve acceptable load time. Well, there are many things that you can implement on your site and optimize it for better fast speed.
Here step by step quick guide for good optimization.
- Reputed Web Host
The very first that you can take is choose the reputed, trusted, quality web hosting which offer high optimized web server and updated software. If you are using WordPress to manage your website then there are numerous cheap hosts available where you can get quality web hosting but at affordable prices.
Keep in mind, never fall in lowest price hosting because they use cannot provide fast web hosting, server, as well latest software to manage your hosting account. You can use SiteGround to get web hosting at reasonable prices with a lot of great features.
- Use Trusted Premium Themes
If you are a serious blogger and want to take your blogging journey to the next level then invest some money to make your website look professional. Never depend on free themes, I agree some companies provide awesome looking free themes but I recommend use paid themes for your websites.
Why?
Because premium themes provider offer you 24/7 technical support, develop their themes for fast rendering, and seo friendly. A clean coded theme reduces website loading team drastically and thus deliver outstanding user experience.
You can get premium themes from MyThemeShop, Themesisle, ElegantThemes, or buy Genesis framework with premium Genesis child themes. All the mentioned names have great reputation as well as user ratings.
- Optimize Your Images
Images play a vital role with user engagement and increase your blog posts look. You can make your posts look stunning by using beautiful images but using too much graphics can increase the overall page size which cause in slow loading. Always optimize your images to reduce the file size before uploading to your hosting server or use WordPress plugins called SMUSH.it.
- WordPress Cache Plugin
WordPress is one of the most used and famous CMS out there because it has thousands of free plugins which you can use for different purposes to achieve requited functionality. Install and activate a well known cache plugin such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache to optimize your website.
Activate .gzip compression, async java scripts, try to load JS files from footer than header, reduce HTML requests and compress CSS style files. You can setup of this stuff using W3 Total Cache plugins. On top of that install Autoptimize WordPress plugin for robust results and fast loading site.
- Use Content Deliver Network
You should/must use CDN service to reduce loading time, a CDN service can help you load your website content from the nearest located data center as CDN providers install their data centers all around the world. When the distance decrease from the user location to the data center, it significantly reduces loading time.
Thought, it might cost you few dollars but at the end deliver great results. There are many best WordPress hosting services available which also offer free CDN or built-in CDN within the hosting price.
- Update Your Website Plugins and Core Files
It is also recommend you should update your WordPress core files and plugins as soon as possible when you get update. It help you protect your website from hackers, vulnerabilities, and malware as well as reducing load time. Sometime, developers find security loopholes and for that develop updates or for better site performance.
Wrapping Up
In the end, all I will say is, always use reputed and trusted web hosting provider, paid theme if its free then the provider should be well-known and optimize your images for better results.
Note: If you are using a free hosting for WordPress then I would suggest don’t use it and stop right away. You cannot get the best speed no matter how many times you tweaked your blog. Free web hosting provider can suspend your account any time without any notification. So, it might cause content lost, traffic, and revenue as well. For worst scenario, you may lost all of your content and articles.
If you are planning to establish an online business, struggling in branding, user trust then never use free host. Invest few in hosting and secure yourself from any disaster.
Try to decrease site time for better rankings in search engines as it also deliver incredible user experience. No one like to wait for a site which takes more than three seconds or higher.