How to speed up WordPress site
We all want what we want and we want it now, in life and online this seems to ring true. For the website owner or developer keeping this in mind when creating a business website can be a headache because all you want to do is speed up WordPress
You want to have a beautiful looking website that draws people in and at times this means sacrificing on speed and functionality, but that need not be the case.
25% of all websites currently online use WordPress, that is 1 in 4 sites. Here are some more notable companies using
Getting started:
Once you have the basics, your domain and web space along with WordPress installed you can start with your content and images. This is often where people seem to go wrong.
Adding high resolution images means that the website becomes ‘heavy’ or slow, this can and will result in people leaving your site before it loads. If you are unsure of what speed your website loads, a good tool is the one provided by Google: Google Page Speed insight
Page Speed Insights measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices. It fetches the url twice, once with a mobile user-agent, and once with a desktop-user agent.
The PageSpeed Score ranges from 0 to 100 points. A higher score is better and a score of 85 or above indicates that the page is performing well. PageSpeed Insights measures how the page can improve its performance on:
- time to above-the-fold load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page and to the moment the above-the-fold content is rendered by the browser.
- time to full page load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page to the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.
The punch line:
The tool WP Smush is the tool that this post is all about, yes there are other optimizing plugins but this is the one that can make a massive impact on the speed and overall performance.
The Result
This is not the only tool that you can use but if you had to only use one, I would suggest this be it