If you've made it this far, you'll know that the loading speed of a website is essential to reduce the bounce rate, which is the number of people who come to your website and don't take any action. Furthermore, this is a quality that is increasingly taken into account by search engines like Google. Before trying to improve the loading speed of your website in Wordpress, you should know some tools for measuring it. This way, we'll know at first what the loading speed is and we'll be able to check its evolution while we make the changes to optimize it.
Check my website speed
1. Google Page Speed The first tool we recommend is Google Page Speed . As its name suggests, it is Google's tool for measuring the loading speed of a web page. With this tool you can find out the speed of your site in a range from 0 to 100. It also offers information on what to improve based on priority to improve loading speed. This tool is also useful when you want to know the speed on different devices separately, offering information on this on mobile and computer separately.
2. Dareboost
Dareboost is a very complete tool that tells us the loading speed and size of our website with scores. It also offers very valuable information about SEO, code quality, accessibility and W3 validation with errors in HTML and CSS. It even indicates which technologies are being used, such as avatar for the website, Wordpress, PHP, etc.
3. GTmetrix
It is considered one of the best tools for measuring the loading speed of a site. It provides detailed percentages of the characteristics of your website that cause the loading process to slow down. In addition, it indicates numerous solutions to remedy these problems and there is even the possibility of showing a comparison with other websites.
Steps to optimize the loading speed of your Wordpress
Enable caching in Wordpress
In Wordpress, pages are generated dynamically, so a series of processes have to be developed before returning the page to your visitor. These processes are not usually slow, but they do cause the page to take longer to display for the recipient. When we talk about enabling the cache, we mean avoiding all these processes so that a preview of the page to be loaded is generated. This is especially useful when many people want to view a page at the same time, since all these processes are avoided in each visit. How do we enable the cache in Wordpress? We explain it below.
To enable the cache, you will need to install a plugin, the most relevant ones for this are WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache . In this case, we will choose W3 Total Cache to enable the cache, below we will show you the steps to follow to enable the plugin correctly:
Next we will break down the plugin structure. On the one hand we find Page Cache , which is the basic module that establishes the cache and enables it to be saved in multiple destinations. On the other hand there is Minify , in charge of optimizing the HTML, CSS and Javascript code. This module is perhaps the most complex to configure, especially if we are just starting out in this. Database Cache , for database queries. Next we will talk about Object Cache , very useful for configuring an object cache for systems such as Memcached or APC with W3 Total Cache. If the module is going to be configured on large websites, the Browser Cache module will be very useful. If we talk about filters, User Agent Groups is the best system, and it also serves a different cache for each group. To filter through referrers we will use Referrer group . Finally we will talk about CDN , which integrates W3 Total Cache with other cache systems.
Uninstall plugins you don't use
This step is very simple and basic, but perhaps we have overlooked it. It is important to uninstall the plugins that you are not using on your WordPress, as these may be slowing down the loading speed of our page.
SSD disks
The effectiveness of SSD memory disks has already been demonstrated, and CMS such as Wordpress that make extensive use of MySQL generate much greater speed on servers with these disks. SSDs are not all advantages, they are more expensive and offer less space, but when it comes to loading speed they are much better than hard drives.
SEO Images
One of the possible problems that occurs with many websites is that the images are not optimized to obtain a considerably fast loading speed. At this point, we will see what steps must be taken into account so that all the images in our Wordpress are optimized for Wordpress.
- Format for SEO images in Wordpress . The main format that the images we upload to Wordpress should have should be JPEG , since it is the one that will give us the best quality/weight ratio. Although we can also use other formats such as PNG or GIF. Although the use of one format or another will depend on the use we want to give to the image. If it is a simple image, and with few colors, we will use GIF, however, if it is for a sharp image with many colors such as a photo, we will use JPEG, and in case we want a high-quality image with transparencies, we will use PNG, although it will be much heavier and therefore will increase the loading time of our website.
- SEO image names . Another important point when optimizing an image is the name we give it, since it is one of the elements that search engines like Google will use to understand what the image refers to. If we want to position the page in which the image is going to be integrated as "men's hair salon" this image has to have a title related to this, such as "men's hair salon". We have to write the file name separating the words with hyphens, in lowercase and without any punctuation marks.
- Image size . Most search engines, such as Google, reward images with a lower weight, since there is also a tendency to prioritize responsive versions and these must contain images optimized for mobile devices. First of all, when selecting the size of our images we must ensure that they do not weigh more than 50 or 60 kb. Although Wordpress gives us the option to resize the image once we have uploaded it, we should not take this option into account, since it will continue to have the original size with which it was uploaded. To save an image with a certain weight, we can use the Photoshop program. From there we will click on "Save for Web" and we will be able to select the type of format, which in our case would be JPEG and the weight that we can graduate by decreasing or increasing the number of pixels.
- Adding tags to images . The following tags will help Google know what type of image it is. It is essential to add an ALT attribute and a title. It is also advisable to use the "width" and "height" tags to specify the dimensions. In addition, we can also introduce the "LONGDESC" tag, which is useful to complement the ALT tag.
Jetpack plugin for Wordpress
With this plugin you can simplify the management of your WordPress site. It is a completely free tool. Among other functions, this plugin facilitates traffic growth and analysis, and it will also help us with the performance of the images.
With jetpack you can automatically optimize and speed up your website's images. This is possible thanks to the global content delivery network of Wordpress.com. This will save you bandwidth and costs.
WP Smush, Image Optimization
Here we present another of the best Wordpress modules to resize and optimize all your images with incredible power, WP Smush . You can also enjoy it completely free. This plugin meticulously scans each image that you upload or that is already added to your website, removes all unnecessary elements from these images to make them less heavy and thus increase the loading speed of your site.
Keep the connection active
This feature, also known as HTTP keep-alive, can be enabled from most caching systems, or you can keep it on by adding a few lines to your hosting's .htaccess file:
Database Optimization
With Web 2.0, all the information on our website is stored in a growing database and it is common for waste to be generated. This may be data that we no longer use and that needs to be deleted to speed up the loading speed. Cleaning the database is an automatic process and very simple to do ourselves. We would only have to go to the left column to see the tables, from there mark all of them and click on the "Optimize" option in the drop-down menu.
We hope that all these steps to follow have been useful to you. You can add more in the comments and help us complete the information in the post. At Línea Gráfica we advise you on everything related to online commerce and Prestashop stores. Contact us on our website without obligation.
