Creating a stunning website is only a job half done. As a professional web design agency in Dubai, we not only create good looking websites, but we make sure that the websites are technically optimized and loads really fast.

Why It Is Important To Work on Improving The Website Speed?

Online users these days are an impatient lot. Based on several analysis, it is found that the users tend to abandon websites when it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Also, websites that loads within 2 seconds have 3 times more conversion or sales, when compared with websites that has a load speed of more than 5 seconds.

So a slow loading website does not only lose traffic, it also loses on sales and conversions.

Here Are 6 Ways To Improve Website Speed

1. Choose The Best Hosting Service Provider

Hosting plays an important role in improving the loading speed of your wordpress website. You might be tempted to host your website with shared hosting service that provides unlimited bandwidth, space and domains. But the problem with shared hosting is that they normally do not provide good loading speed. As the same sever is shared by several domains, the shared hosting service fails to provide top loading speed during peak traffic hours.

In order to have a good website load speed, we suggest hosting your website in dedicated cloud servers provided by Siteground, Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean and others.

2. Update WordPress & Plugins

WordPress on a regular basis provides update with security fixes. Updating your WordPress version to the latest one will keep your website secured and also helps in website load speed.

Updating the plugins to their latest versions and deleting unwanted plugins also helps a website to load fast. When website loads, it also needs to load the code of plugins that are installed in the website. So having unused plugins will also lead to slow website speed.

3. Choose A Light WordPress Theme

A wordpress theme with sliders, video and fancy widgets looks cool. But remember that having too many elements in a webpage and lead to slow website load speed. Having sliders, videos and social widgets in a page will create too many java scripts and it will lead to slow website load speed.

Always choose a theme that is responsive, mobile friendly and loads fast. You can test the load speed of a theme in sites like GT Metrix and Page Speed Insights.

4. Optimize and Lazy Load Images

A website with beautiful images can be engaging to the visitors, but when uploaded without optimization can lead to slow load speed. Image files can be really large, in order to optimize the images you can resize the images, compress the images and lazy load the images.

Resizing the images – When an image originally has a size of 1000 * 2000 and it loads at 500*1000 in the browser, then the browser needs to work on resizing the image when loading. So, uploading the image with correct size will help in improving the website speed.

Compressing the images – Images taken with quality camera will have more pixels and these kind of images will have large file size and will take more time to load. So, you can compress these images to improve the load speed. The images can be compressed without losing the quality using plugins like WP Smush, Optimole and others.

Lazy Loading Images – Without lazy loading, the browser tends to load all the images when a webpage loads. But when you enable lazy loading, browser will only load the images when the user scrolls down the page. So images below the fold of the screen will only load when the user starts to scroll through the page. Several page speed optimization plugins like W3 Total Cache has this feature integrated now.

5. Use a WordPress Caching Plugin and Minify Java Scripts and CSS

Whenever you run a website speed analysis through sites like GT Metrix and Page Speed Insights, you will come across suggestions to minify Java scripts and CSS. Minifying Java Scripts and CSS manually can be a complex task. But fortunately there are several caching plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache and others that helps in minifying Java Scripts and CSS.

These caching plugins also implement caching mechanisms like browser caching and GZip Compression.

6. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN) To Speed-up Website

A website can be visited by people from all over the world. When a visitor visits a website from a faraway location from where the website is hosted, it will impact the website loading speed. For example, if a website is hosted in USA and a visitor visits the website from UAE, the website will load slower for him as the data needs to travel from the server in USA to the visitor’s location.

What a content delivery network does is, it takes a copy of your website and stores it in data centers around the world. And based on the visitor’s location, the data will be retrieved from the nearest data center. And this helps in improved speed of the website. If you are a small business or just getting started, you can use free CDN like Cloudflare.

Conclusion

These are most 6 most essential ways to speed up your wordpress website. Apart from the ranking factor, the biggest advantage of improving the website load speed is it results in improved user experience, reduced bounce rate and increased sales and conversion.

As an experienced wordpress website development agency in Dubai, we make sure that all the websites we develop follow the above guidelines to have good load speed.