Nothing can be more annoying than waiting for a website to load. Although many website owners give priority to sophisticated web design, site performance plays a crucial role in a website's UX. If your site is slow, visitors will get annoyed and go to your competition. Even a one-second delay can result in a significant drop in conversions and affect customer loyalty.
Keeping this in mind, you need to find out what affects your site performance and what improvement you can make.
Choose a Reliable Web Host
Many business owners believe that their job is done once they pay the monthly fee to the hosting company. However, there's much more to website hosting. In fact, there's a very strong connection between the efficiency of your hosting provider and the ROI of your company.
Choosing an unreliable hosting company will have extensive consequences, affecting the performance of the entire site on various parameters like speed, SEO, uptime, and security.
For that reason, it's very important to choose a reliable, cheap website hosting provider that has a number of hosting plans and suits the needs of your site. When choosing a web hosting service, look for one that has an uptime rating of at least 99.5%. Because no matter what steps you take to speed up your website, if your host server is sluggish, your site will remain sluggish.
Use Custom Post Types
Custom post types can be used to store data or information and arrange, display, or administer different types of content on your site. WordPress uses different post types, such as pages, posts, attachments, navigation menus, etc.
Here are a few ways custom post types affect your site performance:
Custom post types allow better content management on the backend;
They improve usability by enabling you to create a process that even non-programmers can figure out;
They allow for a custom content display;
Custom post types improve security by getting rid of third-party plugins;
They increase productivity and efficiency;
Find out more about how you can include custom post types in WordPress search results and improve your site performance.
Optimize Your Images
Images are definitely one of the most important elements in websites. Large hero images, galleries, catalogs, posts featured images, portfolios, illustrations, photos of the company employees...
Images are everywhere and for a good reason - they are attractive, they set the mood of your site, help to convey an idea, support your brand's personality, and more. However, this comes at a price. Image files usually have a large size and every image you upload to your website will affect the website's loading time.
That's why the images you use on your site need to be optimized. That means, it should have an optimal size so your website's loading is not affected by it. An image file size is mostly affected by its quality, dimensions, and file format. By modifying these, you will be able to substantially reduce the size of your images.
Don't Use Too Many Plugins
Many WordPress plugins are certainly necessary for adding functionality to your website without too much fuss. This is especially true if you are maintaining your site on your own and without too much technical knowledge.
But having a large number of plugins or using ones that are not optimized can significantly affect your website performance, cause site crashes, security breaches, and slow loading times.
Unfortunately, there is no magic number of plugins you should have on your site. It will depend on your site and the plugins you are using. As a rule of thumb, try not to use more than 20 plugins. If your website is hosted on a budget or shared hosting, then the number of plugins should be even lower (no more than five)!
Make sure to only use plugins that you really need and don't forget to update them on a regular basis. Also, install plugins from reputable companies and developers, and be sure to remove inactive ones from your website.
Start Using a CDN
If you have high traffic, you might want to consider investing in a CDN (content delivery network). This is a network of servers, all of which host your website content. A CDN will pull your website's content from the server closest to the visitor, reducing loading time.
Having a CDN will not only make a big difference in your site's performance but will also improve UX. Here are several advantages of using a content delivery network:
Improved speed - users report improved site speeds once they start using a CDN provider.
Better UX - A faster website leads to an improved UX. As we've already mentioned, if your site takes ages to load, people will leave. By using a CDN, you'll be able to decrease bounce rates and increase pageviews.
Improved ranking - Google rewards faster-loading sites by ranking them higher in SERPs.
Crash resistance - If you have high traffic, using a content delivery network is non-negotiable. Instead of having all of the traffic going to a single server, a CDN allows you to distribute the load across servers.
Final Thoughts
There you have it - we showed you which factors can affect your site performance and offered solutions to solve the problems.
In today's digital era when people rely on the internet for anything and everything, no business can be successful without an optimal site. If you want to maintain (or even increase) conversions, a speedy website is a must.
