Page Speed Matters

Is your site slow? If so, it’s a bigger issue than ever before. Last weekend I attended WordCamp US and one of the big sessions that was standing room only was a talk called “A View from Google: The Latest in Search and Mobile” by Maile Ohye. Unlike many of the speakers at WordCamp, Maile isn’t in the WordPress field, she’s an employee at Google and has been since 2005. (And here I thought Google was only staffed by Robot Overlords.)

Her talk had a lot of insights into Google, search, and mobile and one point she came back to over and over was page speed. Page speed matters. If your site loads in over 3 seconds, you are losing visitors. One of her points is that in terms of various CMS options, WordPress isn’t the best on the speed scale. But that doesn’t mean we’re all doomed.

What can you do to improve page speed?

Here are a few tips:

1. Upgrade to PHP 7. It’s been out over a year, is stable, and can improve your site performance by double.
2. Deactivate and delete unused or redundant plugins.
3. Enable Gzip compression.
4. Cache, cache, cache. You really must use caching. My favorite caching plugin is WP Rocket. It’s easy to set up and works well.
5. Optimize your images. Don’t upload images straight from your camera, those are way too big. Use a program like TinyPNG to compress your images.
6. Get better web hosting. True story, I recently had a client come to me with a 15 year old site she’d made herself on a hosting plan she’d had just as long. We made her a new site using WordPress, and it was extremely slow on her web host. Painfully slow. I called her web hots twice to complain, and each time they told me it was the web site, not their server, that was the problem and if I’d offer to pay them, they’d fix up the website. Instead, I moved the site to a better host and the site is now blazing fast. It really was them.
7. Use a CDN. If you have an image-heavy websites, use a CDN to deliver static content to users based on their location.
8. If you can, reduce your external scripts. Lots of websites use external scripts for different reasons, like Google Analytics, Google fonts, AdRoll, Facebook, etc. Having a lot of these can slow down your site.

These are just a few tips to help you get headed in the right direction. Page is important. It’s not going to get less important.