Factors affecting the speed of your WordPress site
When working with SEO, website speed is highly important as the site need to be able to load quickly even on mobile device on slow 3G broadband connections.
There are several factors affecting the speed.
The broadband speed of the client
This is a factor that you cannot do anything about.
If the client has a slow broadband connection, then he will just download resources from the site slower and experience that the site in turn have a higher load time.
Even though you cannot do anything about this you still need to take it into consideration when designing you site.
As an example you need to compress images and scripts, so slower connections can download them quicker
That leads us to another factor.
Size of images and video
If your sites is littered with huge images and video-elements, this will highly impact the speed of your site.
In order to speed up your site, you need to compress images.
This can be done with online compressors such as tinypng.com
There are also built-in functions in Photoshop which can compress your images for web.
To many plugins
For many WordPress-site owners it is fairly easy to add new functionality by just installing another plugin.
However this approach is dangerous as you quickly end up with +20 plugins that all needs to be loaded on your site.
Needless to say this will make your site slower, so a key to keeping your WordPress site fast is to limit the use of plugins to only the ones you really need.
External scripts
Some websites relt on external scripts and resource and while this is a good idea if the CDN is very fast, this can actually be an issue of the CDN does not preform.
Therefore, you should always check of dependencies on external resources when loading your site. Maybe its waiting on some of the to load the page?
The hosting provider
It is always easy to blame the hosting provider when the site is not fast enough.
The truth is however that most speed-related issues is not related to the host.
Instead, it is poorly coded plugins, themes or use of large images that clutter up the site.
However, some hosts are just terribly slow, especially if they are using SATA disks instead of LVME SSD disks and overload their servers with too many clients.
So if you have done everything you can to speed up your site and it is still slow, then try changing the host – it might help.
Written by: Michael from Beginnrtuts.com 27-02-2023 Written in: Guides