You’re in a BIG trouble if your site loads only reasonably quickly.
For today’s consumers, whose attention span is awfully short, nothing less than a lightning-fast website would do.
If viewers are abandoning your site rather quickly and consistently, chances are your site is loading slowly, or let’s say not very quickly.
Research shows that users don’t like to stay on a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, get your site to load within 3 seconds or get ready to say a premature bye-bye to your viewers.
It’s not just regular sites or blogs that need to load faster to catch users’ attention. This applies to ecommerce sites as well.
If your site takes a second longer to load, your conversion rate will drop by 7 percent. In other words, every second counts.
Thankfully, you can speed up your site if it’s running slow—and we’ll show you how.
In this 2-part series, we share with you easy, practically, and effective DIY methods to get your site run faster than Ben Johnson on steroids.
So, let’s get started…
Analyzing the Plugin Performance
Plugins play an important role in the performance of your WordPress website. If you have multiple plugins installed, check their loading time and their effect on the overall performance of your WordPress website.
There are several plugins available for WordPress platform that can analyze plugins performance. You can use the P3 plugin, also known as Plugin Performance Profiler, to analyze performance of your plugins.
How to Use the P3 Plugin
There are two options available to you—Auto Scan and Manual Scan. Both are discussed below
After you’ve installed the P3 Plugin, follow these steps:
- Go to the tools menu
- Click P3 Plugin Profiler tab
- Then click StartScan button
- Here you’ll have two options – Auto Scan and Manual Scan
- Click Auto Scan.
- Once website scanning is completed, click View Results to see the loading time of each plugin installed on your website.
ALTERNATELY…
You can also use the manual scan option to analyze performance of each page. When you scan individual pages, you get a detailed report of speed and resources used by each active plugin for that page.
Understanding the Data
Getting the necessary data is one-thing. Deciphering it to bring useful changes is another.
What’s so special about the P3 Plugin is that it allows you to mail results not only to you but also to your developer or support team.
In case programming is not your strong point, you can share these results with the developer team and ask them to look into the matter. They can find out real issues that are degrading performance of plugins and suggest viable alternatives.
Many times plugins are not updated regularly and incompatibility leads to poor WordPress performance. In such cases, switching to compatible plugins helps enhance the performance of the website.
Image Optimization
Larger images can slow down a site. But worry not as image optimization can save the day for you.
There are different ways to optimize images on your WordPress website.
Compress images– It refers to reducing the size of the image file without degrading the image quality below the acceptable level. You need to compress unnecessarily large images to reduce their size, which would automatically reduce loading time.
Lazy Loading – It refers to optimizing technique where only visible content is downloaded.
Use browser cache- You can give instruction to browsers to keep image files and CSS for a longer time. This will help reduce loading time even if the visitors come to your website after a long time.
Use CSS wherever possible- You can use CSS to generate shapes instead of using images.
