Loading times can make or break your website experience. How long your website takes to load, even by milliseconds, it will affect how long your visitor will stay on the website, the possibility of looking to other pages and it will definitely affect the conversion rate. In other words, you are losing prospective clients by having a slow website.
Besides losing that prospective client, it will also affect your Google ranking. Yes, Google now takes into consideration how fast your website loads to the users.
What can you do to speed up the loading time? For photographers and event planners, this is a big one.
Don't show full blog posts. It's that simple. I've seen it time and time again. People feel that having a blog where they can show all the posts in full looks pretty, plus you want everyone to see your work right there without clicking on a post. Trust me I get it, but it will make your mobile and desktop site extremely slow. All those images, content, widgets, etc. will need to load for the user which will then affect the speed of your website.
Steps to optimize your Wordpress website:
- Make your blog only show excerpts and not full posts
- Keep the amount of posts per page to a total of 5
- Optimize your images. Don't upload the largest image. If necessary use a plugin image optimizer like EWWW Image Optimizer
- Uninstall unnecessary plugins. If you don't use it, deactivate and delete!
- Limit the amount of widgets. Ask yourself: Does it bring value to your content? No? Then delete it.
- Use a caching plugin to speed up loading times. This one is a plugin, yes, but a useful one. I recommend WP Super Cache
You are unsure of the speed of your website? Then test it out! There are free tools that will calculate your website speed.
Recommended time is 3 seconds, with some recommending from 4 to 7 seconds. How fast is your website loading? Tell me in the comments!
