The frustration of having a eye-catching website only to have it load very slowly can be a deterrent to visitors.
Any web developer will tell you how important it is to have a site that loads quickly, but how do you accomplish this goal?
There are various plugins as well as techniques that can help you speed up loading times. Having a quick loading site influences everything from number of visitors to bounce rate and sales conversions.
Quality Web Hosting Matters
Investing in a quality hosting service will give you a better opportunity of your website loading correctly. As a rule of thumb in life, you get what you paid for. Shared hosting can be a budget friendly option, but having many sites on one server can lead to slow loading times and images not displaying correctly. Managed WordPress can be a viable choice if you want a dedicated hosting choice specially designed for your type of site, and usually does not require a lot of technical skills.
Keeping up to date with PHP versions
Your WordPress site should be updated to PHP version 7.2. This will update in November of 2020, so keep track of what PHP version you are using. If you are using a premium hosting company, they should update it automatically.
Back up and Maintain your Database
Just like updating your themes, you should be maintaining your database and cleaning up unwanted items like unused plugins and freeing up disk space.
Optimize your images
Compress your images and display them at smaller sizes so that they load smoothly without slowing down your site. Plugins like Tinypng can help shrink images on your site automatically after your upload them.
These are some basic tips to keep you site loading smoothly. Many times, users will leave a site if it loads too slowly out of frustration causing a higher bounce rate and wasting potential leads that can be converted into sales. For more advice on how to make your site load efficiently, email us at sales@uncommoncontempos.com .
