7 Tips to Increase Your Page Loading Speed in 2024
written by
Victoria Kurichenko
posted on
July 27, 2024
A slow website frustrates users, affects search rankings, and can lower conversion rates.
That’s a lot of potential negative impact on your website.
In today’s fast-paced online world, users expect websites to load quickly and deliver a smooth experience. If your site lags, you’re not just losing potential customers, you’re also hurting your visibility in search results. The good news is that there are steps you can take to improve your website speed and mitigate these negative consequences.
This guide will explore the importance of loading speed and provide actionable tips to improve your WordPress website’s performance. Whether using a standard theme or custom WordPress development services, these strategies will help you achieve faster load times.
If you want to improve your website’s loading speed, take the following steps:
- Choose a reliable hosting provider
- Reduce server response time
- Use caching plugins
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Enable gzip compression
- Update WordPress and plugins
- Optimize images
7 tips to improve your page loading speed
Let’s review each step below in detail.
1. Choose a reliable hosting provider
The company you choose to host your website significantly impacts how fast it loads. A good hosting provider makes sure your website responds to visitors’ requests quickly and runs smoothly overall.
Reliable hosting providers offer robust infrastructure, advanced caching mechanisms, and excellent support, essential for maintaining optimal site performance.
On top of that, they often include features like automatic backups of your website’s data and extra security measures, which also contribute to your website’s trustworthiness and speed.
Think about using a hosting company that is particularly good with WordPress, such as SiteGround or WP Engine.
As an example, this website is running on Cloudways.
2. Reduce server response time
Server response time is the amount of time it takes for your server to respond to a request from a user’s browser.
A slow server response can negatively impact your site’s loading speed and make your site visitors leave.
You can reduce server response time by optimizing your database, using a content delivery network (CDN). CDNs distribute your content across multiple servers worldwide, reducing the distance between users and your site and speeding up load times.
In addition, consider upgrading your hosting plan to one with more resources if your current plan struggles to handle your website’s traffic.
3. Use caching plugins
Caching plugins can help improve your website performance.
They store a static version of your website, reducing the load on your server and speeding up load times for repeat visitors.
For example, popular caching plugins for WordPress include W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. These plugins can be configured to cache pages, posts, and other content, significantly improving load times for returning users. Additionally, some caching plugins offer features like minification and Gzip compression, which can further reduce page loading speed.
As an SEO writer and website owner, I use the Breeze plugin to manage my website’s cache. This is Cloudway’s plugin, which helps my website work in tandem with my hosting provider.
4. Minimize HTTP requests
Every element on a webpage, such as an image, a script, or a stylesheet, requires an HTTP request.
The more requests your website makes, the longer it takes to load. Therefore, I recommend minimizing HTTP requests. Here’s how:
- Combine files: Merge multiple CSS and JavaScript files into single files for each type. This reduces the number of requests needed to render the page.
- Optimize images: Reduce image file sizes by compressing them without sacrificing significant quality.
- Enable lazy loading: Load images only when they are scrolled into view, prioritizing content above the fold (immediately visible area).
- Leverage caching: Store frequently accessed files like scripts and styles on users’ browsers, reducing the need to download them on every visit.
- Use asynchronous loading: This prevents scripts from blocking the rendering of other elements on the page.
I also encourage you to review Google’s recommendations on how to improve your website page loading speed.
5. Enable gzip compression
Gzip compression reduces the size of files sent from your server to the user’s browser.
Gzip compression can significantly speed up your website by shrinking file sizes before sending them to visitors. Here’s how it works:
- Imagine gzip compression like zipping a folder. It identifies repetitive patterns in text-based files like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- By removing these redundancies, the overall file size is reduced, requiring less data transfer.
- Smaller files travel faster across the internet, leading to quicker website loading times.
- Faster loading times can improve user experience, keeping your visitors engaged and happy.
Search engines like Google favor websites that load quickly, potentially boosting your SEO ranking.
Gzip compression is compatible with most web browsers and requires minimal configuration on your web server.
Most caching plugins, including Breeze, let you enable gzip compression.
If your plugin doesn’t have this feature, you can enable it manually via your server settings or .htaccess file.
6. Update WordPress and plugins regularly
Keeping your WordPress site up-to-date plays a big role in website speed.
That’s because updates often include performance optimizations that make WordPress itself run smoother.
Outdated plugins can have compatibility issues and bloat your website with unnecessary code. On the other hand, new plugin versions frequently address bugs that might be slowing down your site.
Updates sometimes patch security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by malicious actors, impacting performance.
I recommend using automatic updates, which is a quick way to keep your WordPress website up-to-date without your involvement.
Automatic updates are convenient, but remember to back up your site before any major updates, just in case.
One more tip: regularly review your plugins and deactivate or delete any that are no longer essential.
7. Optimize images
Images are often the biggest reason behind slow websites. Optimizing them can significantly improve your website’s speed.
From my experience running this website and helping clients succeed, I recommend using a next-gen file format, WEBP, which provides smaller file sizes with similar quality to JPEGs.
The following tools will help you compress images without sacrificing quality:
- TinyPNG
- Smush
- CloudConvert
Google’s advocate, John Mueller, shares the best practices on how to optimize images for search engines.
Okay. How do I assess my page loading speed?
As an SEO expert, I recommend using Google’s PageSpeed Insights (PSI). This is a free tool developed by Google to help you analyze your website performance on mobile and desktop devices.
Here’s how you can use it:
- Open PageSpeed Insights and enter your website URL.
- Click “Analyze” to run a page speed test.
- PSI assigns scores (0–100) for mobile and desktop speed.
- It also provides Core Web Vitals assessment: First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
- Each metric has a “Good,” “Needs Improvement,” or “Poor” rating based on speed thresholds.
- PSI offers specific suggestions to improve speed, like optimizing images or reducing render-blocking JavaScript.
- “Lab data” simulates load time in a controlled environment for troubleshooting.
- “Field data” (when available) shows real-world user experience from Chrome User Experience Report.
Once you get the performance insights from the tool, I recommend reviewing the list and prioritizing the issues that affect your website the most.
For example, in my case, it’s the largest content paint element, CSS and Javascript elements, and image sizes.
Hello there!
My name is Victoria.
I am an SEO expert, Medium top writer, solopreneur, and the founder of Self Made Millennials. I help companies create optimized content and attract potential customers through organic search results. In addition, I share how content creators can monetize their writing skills.
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