Nobody likes a slow website
Website loading speed is one of the important factors which determines whether you get a good ranking in search engines like Google or Bing. Website speed is a ranking factor, and its importance keeps growing.
A fast website provides a much better user experience than a slow one. Research has shown time and again that people don’t buy as much from slower sites, and don’t read or engage as much on slower sites. That in itself should be enough reason to make sure the speed of your site is as good as can be.
As page load time goes from:
1s to 3s the probability of bounce increases 32%
1s to 5s the probability of bounce increases 90%
1s to 6s the probability of bounce increases 106%
1s to 10s the probability of bounce increases 123%
Beyond just being better for users, faster websites can be easier for search engines to crawl, process and index. That means that your posts will take less time to show up in the search results, as well as performing and ranking better.
Best website speed measurement tools
Speed tests may vary based on the location of the test, environmental influences (like the time of day), and some other factors. This is just one reason why speed tools do not always provide the same identical results. Different tools may measure speed differently, and may even use completely different metrics.
That’s why I recommend using all of these tools when testing a website (and do not rely on just one):
The best WordPress plugins to speed up your site
In most cases, installing one (yes… just only one!) of the following plugins should get you started. Most of them come with full page caching (where a static version of each page is saved and served to users, without needing to load WordPress and your whole site), and various flavours of resource optimisation (image compression, lazy loading, etc).
- WP Rocket – great, powerful, and one of the very best options to make your site faster. Designed to be simple just there is no free or trial option.
- W3 Total Cache – extremely powerful, and extremely flexible. Designed to be comprehensive, hundreds of options.
- WP Optimize – a good middle ground, with basic full page caching, and some sophisticated database + media optimization tools.
- WP Super Cache – a basic solution which offers full page caching, but lacks other/advanced optimization techniques.
- Autoptimize – some really nice JS/CSS/HTML optimization, though no full page caching.
Optimize images
The size of an average website is comprised of about 50% images. So if you can shrink the size of the images you use on your site, you have a chance to make a meaningful dent in your site’s file size.
That’s important because:
Smaller website file size = faster-loading website
Conclusion
Hardly any website gets a perfect PageSpeed score, in fact, it is very, very hard to achieve. You should not take all of the suggestions from website speed measurement tools in a literal sense, because sometimes they are unrealistic, or even impossible.
Every millisecond can make the difference between a visitor buying or leaving, there’s always more room for performance optimization.