How To Optimize Your WordPress Site Speed – 100k Subscribers #47

We have been spending a bit of time lately working on our website. For some of you maybe a fully optimized website isn’t as much a priority but here at Dottotech it is a valuable tool we rely on everyday. If you have a website for your business then this is important to read. We use WordPress, so the tips I discuss in my video relate to WordPress specifically. So why did we spend so much time tinkering? It was SLOW! Studies show that 40% of viewers abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load! Wow, that’s crazy. I mean we do have to take some responsibility here. There probably wasn’t enough emphasis put on how to build it out efficiently. We simply made changes, added things and before too long it slowed down, enough so we took a direct approach on how to reduce the load it was carrying and allow it to operate quickly and responsively. My first bit of advice is to get a baseline of how your website is currently performing. We used Google’s testing tool in order to find out how bad things really were.  There are a number of remedies you can pursue. In our video we cover a few ideas, choose what works best for you. I will say that making sure your site functions quickly is important for anyone trying to build or grow a brand online. Google accounts for site speed in their algorithm. So if you have a site that lags it could be affecting your SEO, which could be a big problem. SEO is important in online marketing. But the fact the almost half of your visitors will leave your site in 3 seconds is a huge potential loss for your business. In this case every nano-second matters. A quick list of some things to address area as follows:

1. Compress your images: Typically images are the largest files on your site. So if you compress them it will reduce a tremendous strain your site may be feeling. There are plenty of tools that can serve this purpose. We used EWWW, now we didn’t take time to test multiple tools for this purpose. We did find that EWWW did a solid job for us. Feel free to do your research on providers as you see fit.
2. Optimize your plugins: Plugins in WordPress are obviously necessary. But we encourage you to look and see if there are any alternatives for the ones you are currently running, or if you can eliminate any of them all together.
3. Choose a solid Caching Plugin: Caching stores bits and pieces of your site to improve load time. This typically helps in return visitors or even when a visitor opens several pages of your site. We used W3 Total Cache for this purpose and it works great.

I’m sure that there are some WordPress guru’s out there that have far more intensive approaches to solving this problem. But for us, we know enough about WordPress to get ourselves in trouble, as you can tell by this article. These solutions are geared more for the type of online folks like us that want to try and manage this problem on their own. I know I have a far greater knowledge of the site now and how it operates. More importantly I know more steps to take to ensure it has the proper tools to work efficiently, now and further on down the line. Take a look at your site and do some research. I’m sure there are more than a few ways you can improve your sites performance. I mean, nobody wants possibly 40% of their future fans to click off your site simply because it took a few too many seconds to load. Have fun, it will take a little work but we assure you once the changes are made you will have greater peace of mind. Until next time, have fun stormin’ the castle.