We absolutely adore WordPress, but without taking the right precautions, you can end up with a sluggish site. We believe good website performance equals good web design. It’s a big part of what our Bootplate theme framework project is all about.
Why Performance Matters
First time visitors will only hang around for a few seconds and if those seconds are wasted waiting for the page to load, you’ll lose them.
A much-cited report by the Microsoft Bing search team suggests a 2-second longer delay in page loading speed reduced user satisfaction by 3.8%, increased lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and reduced clicks by 4.3%.
Not only that, but Google now includes site speed in it’s search rankings algorithm. That means performance influences SEO–not just user experience.
It’s enough to lose sleep over.
5 Ways to Speed Up WordPress
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet, but here are a few fairly simple ways you can build a site that’s as performant as it is beautiful.
#1. Choose a Good Web Host
Website hosting providers are NOT created equal. When you’re paying just a few bucks a month, it’s not gonna be fast. You’re probably on shared hosting which they’ve packed as many websites on the same server as they possibly can. You might get a part of a part of a part of a part of a processing core. That’s not gonna cut it.
If you can afford it, go with something like VPS (a virtual private server), Semi-Dedicated (shared, but not by as many people) like jHost, or a managed hosting provider like WP Engine.
#2. Start with a Solid Theme Framework
You might be surprised to hear this, but even the default WordPress themes are lightweight and speedy. That’s because they’ve kept the “guts” simple and not bloated.
We’ve taken a similar approach in building our Bootplate framework and even added a few additional performance-enhancing features not found in other themes/theme frameworks, like asynchronous CSS.
Ok, we’ll stop tooting our own horn now.
#3. Losslessly Optimize Images
Often as not, the heaviest assets on your site are probably the images. You can try and compress them yourself, but you’ll almost certainly end up with an end product that’s nowhere near as beautiful as it was.
There is such a thing as “lossless compression” where you can drastically reduce the file size of images uploaded to your WordPress site with no noticeable loss of quality–automatically.
Two of our favorites are Kraken and WP Smush Pro. Both are available as WordPress plugins, so there’s no need to hire a developer to get started. They’re also free or very inexpensive.
#4. Use a CDN
A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, takes all your static files (CSS, Javascript, images, etc.) and off-loads them onto a network of their servers around the world. As these files are requested by a visitor to your site, a copy of the file is automatically downloaded from the nearest (and fast) server to that person.
In this way, your CDN decreases the wait time for large assets being downloaded from physical locations that could be a long, long way away. Nerds would say, “CDNs decrease latency and load-balance.” We prefer the way MaxCDN (one of our favorites) put it in this video on the jHost blog.
#5. Optimize Delivery
There are a few handy and pretty easy ways to optimize the delivery of resources from your website to its visitors. These might include things like:
- Combine & Minify CSS and JS
- Use a public CDN for common resources (like jQuery)
- Enable Browser Caching
- Add Expire Headers
- Lazy-load images
…just to name a few.
Sound a little too technical. Check out the Optimization section of our Getting Started Guide. It’s mostly about how to do these things with the Bootplate theme framework, but much of it could be done for ANY properly coded theme out there.
Well, there you go. Performance is as important as the design of your website. These days it pays to be 1-part designer and 1-part developer–or just use a theme built on that principle.
(hint, hint; wink, wink)