CentrioHost Blog

Is your WordPress website load speed slow ? If yes, we need to work on that.

Ohh and if your website loads pretty quickly, can it be made even quicker – Every millisecond literally makes a difference. We can measure your site’s performance and see if there’s anything else to make it just a wee bit faster. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

Before I tell you how you can make your website a great deal faster, I’ll try to establish the importance of having a fast loading website.

Does Site Speed Matter ?

Your website load speed matters a great deal to ensure good search engine ranking and a great user experience. It is a known fact that Google’s search algorithm includes your page load times as one of the many parameters while calculating pagerank. Let’s have a look at what Google has to say about site speed and how it might affect your website and the size of your audience.

Google’s Take On Speed

At Google, they created an experiment to replicate the slowness that accompanies a website or webpage with a bad page load speed.

Google’s team did this by creating a system where the speed is deliberately decreased by injecting a server side delay, which translates to extending the processing time before and during the time that results are returned to the browser.

From the user perspective it doesn’t matter much whether the results are returned slowly or the ability of their browser to process those results is slow. In effect, you wouldn’t know that it is your browser that is slow and not the webpage, but it creates the same effect as you would if you were on a webpage that loads slowly.

By dropping the load speed from 100 milliseconds to 600 milliseconds, there was a decrease in the number of searches by 0.2% to 0.6%, results averaged over four to six weeks. You might be tempted to question the significance of these results.

It was also discovered that those exposed to a 200 millisecond delay performed 0.22% less searches in the first three weeks and 0.36% less searches in the second three week period. And with a 400 millisecond delay, the same results followed a decrease of 0.44% and 0.76% in the first and second three week periods. As you can imagine such an impact in the number of searches performed is huge given the scale of Google web search.

Apart from Google several major companies including AOL, Microsoft, Bing and Shopzilla have recognized the importance of having websites that load quickly. You can read more about it here.

Website Load Speed Matters – User Experience

Now forget the numbers, how much fun might using a slow website be ? How many times have you visited a slow website and never bothered to visit again ? How many times have you cursed your internet connection when it goes into a slumber ? Slow websites are no fun.

Before we get into “making your site” faster, how fast is it to begin with ? Let’s look at few tools to help us out!

How Well Does Your Website Fare ?

We need to measure current site performance, only then will be able to measure any improvements in performance. You can use one of the following,

• GTmetrix
• WebPageTest
• PageSpeed Tools

To keep track of your website regularly, you can access site performance under labs via your Google Analytics account. If you’ve haven’t yet added your website to GA, you should. Apart from these methods, most hosting services also provide access to basic page load speed information.

Now, let’s look at about a dozen things you can do to make your website faster.

1. Hosting Service Selection

Whilst there are multiple things that you can do to enhance your site’s performance, such methods have their limitations. Tweaking software will only help optimize site performance. But when it really comes down to it, nothing beats the best hardware. Shared hosting is an option for low traffic sites but as your site traffic grows you need to scale your hardware. Virtual Private Hosting, Dedicated Hosting and Managed Hosting are options used by high/medium traffic sites. Dedicated hosting is reserved for the biggest sites with millions of daily visits. VPS is designed for the technically adept and Managed WordPress Hosting is for the non-tech savvy running an online business.

2. Use The Best Caching Plugin

(Assuming you use anything other than Managed WordPress Hosting where caching is provided in-house by your hosting company)

WP Rocket is a premium best selling caching plugin that works efficiently to optimize your site for speed. There are many WP caching plugins which in my opinion, a bit too complicated for a WP newbie. And the complexity of options is good for expert and intermediate level WP user. WP Rocket isn’t too difficult to figure out and use.

WP Rocket performs page caching to decrease load speeds, cache preloading to help with site indexing by search engines, images load only upon request (when you scroll down, not when a page first loads), file compression to convert HTML, JS & CSS to static files and the plugin is rather developer friendly.

When I was writing a post about the Top 6 Caching plugins, one of the conclusions I came to was it was very difficult to compare caching plugins. The reason every plugin is a bit different and configuring every plugin optimally is not easy, if you do not set the same configurations on all the plugins it makes the plugins impossible to compare. Instead I basically asked our readers to go with the plugin they felt was the easiest to use. And do read the post about Top 6 Caching Plugins, if you want more options including freemium and free caching plugins.

More info / Download If you do not use WP Rocket, a few things to consider. This is a breakdown of functions that would otherwise be performed by a caching plugin. Ensure that your alternate caching solution provides of all these functions. If not use a free caching plugin plus one or two other plugins to replicate most of WPRocket’s features.

A free caching plugin normally accomplishes the following. 

Minify HTML, CSS & Javascript

All that blank space, comments, new line characters and anything redundant in your code that makes it easier on the eye without purpose is completely useless to a server and the IP that trying to reach out to your servers requesting your site.

Remove all this stuff with a free caching plugin and your site will be better off in terms of performance.

Minimize the number of HTTP requests

You can reduce the number of requests made to your site’s servers. Every time someone visits your site, they request your website’s files. This includes HTML files, CSS and JS files. If you have multiple files of each file type, then for every individual file a request is sent to your servers.

Having a high number of files requiring multiple server requests is not efficient at all. You can reduce this by combining JS scripts, HTML and CSS files together. A free caching plugin will suffice.

Replace PHP With Static HTML

Also known as super caching where in the PHP is completely bypassed and files are served in HTML. Super Caching is performed with mod_rewrite and is certainly among the fastest caching methods available to your site. The difference between supercached static files served by PHP and one served in full HTML is imperceptible, but it does make your site faster. Again as before free caching plugins should be sufficient to accomplish super caching served by HTML.

GZIP Compression

Compress your code, essentially make a text file containing code smaller. Your website’s files are simply compressed which helps reduce your bandwidth usage and obviously lowers load times, once the compressed file is received at the browser end, it can be easily read. This function can be accomplished by a free caching plugin like W3TC.

Browser Caching

For static content like JS, CSS and images, these can be downloaded and stored on