How To Improve WordPress Site Speed

Improving your website speed is key in creating an excellent website experience for users and search engines. From a ux perspective, you want your website to load quickly which will help to minimize drop off from bored users expecting a page to load quickly. 

Search engines use site speed metrics to help determine an excellent experience for their users. Search engines like Google strive to provide an optimal user experience for their searchers, meaning that sites with poor load times can be penalized in rankings. 

If you build your website on WordPress there are a few must have apps and tricks that can help you speed up the performance of your site. This article will examine a few of those ways.

Minifying Images 

Image heavy websites are notorious for having site speed issues. Images are one of the most intensive items to load onto a screen. 

Prior to upload, compressing your images as small as possible will be helpful in reducing the memory drain on your servers. 

After the upload, you can search for hundreds of plugins in the wordpress database that will help you compress your images even further on site. 

Compressing Javascript 

Everytime you add new javascript code to your website (such as Analytics tracking code, new plugins, social sharing widgets, etc.) you are increasing the page load burden for a user. If not properly optimized, this can be a major drag on page load time that needs to be addressed. 

Look for plugins that help to minify your CSS and Javascript. Try your best to limit your usage of plugins to only safe and trusted items, and do often cleanups to remove old plugins that you are not using while updating currently active items. 

Try NitroPack 

NitroPack is a paid wordpress plugin that automates the site speed optimization for your site in the background, daily. NitroPack can minify images, compress javascript, enable lazy loading and more. It’s an excellent tool if performance is your main goal and you don’t have a large technical knowledge base.