Page speed refers to the total time taken for your content to load when a user pays a visit to your site.
A fast loading site increases your chances for a higher ranking, compared to a slower loading site.
How To Increase the Loading Speed of your WordPress Website
Some of the measures that can be used to increase the website load speed include:
1. Minification
Minification involves optimizing your code (HTML, CSS, JS) in order to reduce the sizes of the respective files.
We recommend using the Autoptimize plugin to assist in minification.
2. Caching
Website caching helps in storing copies of our website within the server, hence reducing the amount of time taken for the server to display your website once visited by a user.
If your hosts’ server supports caching, this can be enabled from their end. Alternatively you can use a WordPress plugin to implement caching. We recommend using the W3 Total Cache plugin.
3. Web Host Efficiency
The web host you are using within your website plays a vital role in the load speed.
It is important to choose a performance optimized web host. A poor hosting solution will often result in low loading speed.
4. Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is a network of servers that helps in distributing copies of your site to other servers around the globe. This helps in ensuring that users have a faster access to your site, across various regions around the globe, as there is reduced network latency.
We recommend using the Cloudflare CDN. In WordPress, it can be quickly set up with the help of the Cloudflare plugin.
For a quick walkthrough on the setup, we recommend checking out the guide here.
5. Optimizing Your Images
It is important to ensure that the image files in use are not larger than required, and are in the right format.
Images that are too large are heavy to load and will result in delays in loading time. Compressing images helps in reducing the sizes of such images helps in improving the load time.
Implementing Lazy loading on your images will also help in improving the load time within your site.
You can use an image optimization plugin to compress and optimize your images. We recommend using either Smush or Ewww Image Optimizer plugins. For Lazy Loading improvements, you can also consider the Lazy Load plugin.
For more details on improving the site speed, we recommend checking out the article here.