Have you ever questioned why you need a speedy website?

Well, fast-loading pages improves user experiences, increase pageview, and help with your WordPress SEO. 

Website performance is just beyond the website speed, and it is just more than immediate user experiences that affect conversion to ranking. 

Enhancing your WordPress site’s performance is a game-changer. 

Research reveals that a site loading in just 1 second boasts a conversion rate three times higher than those taking 5 seconds, and a whopping five times higher than those at the 10-second mark. This underlines the immense impact of optimising performance on your site’s success.

In this guide, we will explore the pivotal reasons behind the significance of performance and equip you with a practical checklist. 

This checklist contains strategies tailored to elevate your WordPress website’s performance to its optimal level. Let’s delve into the details.

What is Website Performance?

The term website performance is not just used for the website speed it encompasses other factors too. 

Web performance encompasses objective metrics- loading speed and conversion rates – and the user’s perceived experience. Essentially, it gauges how well your website meets the needs of your audience.

Beyond just speed, monitoring site performance involves ensuring all page elements load accurately, in their designated positions, and with proper functionality. This includes guaranteeing clickable buttons, seamless video playback, and smooth user interaction, all crucial for a flawless user experience.

Why does Website Performance Matter?

Website performance is a complex concept that surpasses mere speed and encompasses various factors pivotal for your site’s triumph.

Grasping the significance of website performance is fundamental for those aiming to unlock the full potential of their WordPress site.

What Slows down your WordPress Website?

There are many reasons to slow down your it. Knowing what slows down your website will help you to improve the website’s performance. 

A slow website can stem from various factors:

• Web Hosting Issues: 

Inadequately configured hosting servers can throttle site speed.

• WordPress Setup: 

When your WordPress site doesn’t cache pages, server loads increase, leading to slowdowns or crashes.

• Bloated Page Size: 

Unoptimized images are a major culprit, causing pages to load slowly.

• Problematic Plugins: 

Poorly coded plugins can heavily drag down your site’s performance.

• External Scripts: 

Elements like ads or font loaders from external sources can significantly impact site speed.

These elements can bottleneck your website’s performance, leading to slower load times or even site unavailability.

WordPress Performance Checklist

• Choose reliable managed WordPress Hosting 

WordPress hosting is the core of any WordPress site. The hosting provider you choose will impact your site speed, security, and ability to scale up as your site and your traffic grow.

A low-cost solution could work well for low-traffic sites, but it can require sharing server resources with other websites. If your neighbour’s server uses more resources than they anticipated, this could unintentionally impact your site. Many of the technical responsibilities involved in managing a WordPress site may be handled by a managed WordPress server, giving you more time to concentrate on your company.

While choosing a hosting provider you need to check a few key factors like the location of their server, their uptime guarantee, and 24/7 customer support. 

WP engine is one of the best hosting solutions for the WordPress website. 

• Theme, plugin, and Font

For each element you add to your website to load effectively, a certain quantity of server resources is required. It will take longer and make it more difficult to load bigger files. Therefore, a website with many huge WordPress themes, plugins, or font files will load slower than one with less code.

Using a lightweight theme, to begin with, and adding extra plugins or font files to enhance functionality is the best strategy when creating a new website.

• Optimize image and video for speed

Large, unoptimised photos and videos can slow down your website just as much as your plugins, themes, and font files can do. 

Image optimisation usually entails selecting the best image format for online usage, applying lazy load for images, and minimising the file size of an image without sacrificing quality.

Similar to optimising photos, videos should also be optimised by selecting the optimum format and minimising video compression.

• Keep Database Clean 

Your database records any modifications you make to an aspect of your website. Databases may get overloaded with pointless information, including changes, outdated plugin data, spam comments, and temporary choices. This cluttered condition may have an impact on the functionality of the website. Frequent database optimisation guarantees the speedy and error-free operation of your website.

• Use Content Delivery Network

Cache copies of your website are stored on a global network of servers known as a Content Delivery Network (CDN). The content delivery network (CDN) increases the speed and dependability of your website by delivering its material from the server that is nearest to the user when they visit it.

A site’s speed and accessibility for a worldwide audience can be significantly enhanced by using a CDN in conjunction with a reliable hosting company.

Every plan offered by WP Engine makes use of Cloudflare CDN, which speeds up the delivery of pages to visitors worldwide and reduces the number of queries sent to the WP Engine origin server.

Conclusion

You must make sure your WordPress websites are operating at peak efficiency. You can make sure your site is operating at its best all the time by keeping an eye on important details like the calibre of your hosting, the components you employ, the delivery method for your content, and your continuous maintenance obligations.