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If you’ve ever checked a new website and caught yourself struggling not to fall asleep (or break your monitor) while waiting for it to load, you’ll understand why speeding up your WordPress website is critical for its success.
The site’s speed performance is not only important for peace of mind, but also for providing an excellent user experience. It will shape the way visitors view your online business and instil trust (or distrust) in your brand, and that’s not all of it.
Site speed is an essential element of search engine optimization (SEO (opens in new tab)) as it influences the site’s bounce rates, conversion rates, page views, and other crucial components of web analytics. In short, it’ll help you stand out among similar online businesses and stacks up against your chief competitors.
However, working out all nuts and bolts of WordPress site performance can shift from super simple to confusing in a matter of seconds. So, to help you out, we’ve come up with this step-by-step guide on ways to speed up your WordPress site.
Let’s start with the first tip.
1. Run performance tests
Before starting to tweak your site’s speed performance, you’ll want to know where you stand – that is, how terrible (or terrific) the site’s speed actually is.
While there is no one-size-fits-all sort of metrics to show the way – the site’s performance can be affected by the visitor’s country, their Wi-Fi signal strength, and whether the site is being cached by their web browser.
All the same, you’ll want to utilize some of the top speed testing tools available online (such as GTmetrix, Pingdom, and Dareboost) and see how your site stands in terms of speed. To do so, go to one of these sites, copy/paste your home page URL into the box, and press Enter.
A few seconds later you’ll find out how your site performs and even get some suggestions about optimizing its speed.
2. Delete unused plugins
As with most things in life, more is not better when…
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