If you have been paying attention to how your WordPress site performs on page speed insights, then you know that this is a major ranking factor for search engine optimization. You can improve your rankings by making sure your site loads quickly and sticks to the standards of page speed insights. This blog post will show you how! all you need to know on how to speed up a WordPress site.
Is pagespeed the most important ranking factor?
The short answer is no, but it’s still a very important factor. As of April 2017, the Google ranking algorithm has over 200 signals and page speed insights that affect how fast your site loads.
Loading speeds are more important to users than they were in 2012 when page speed was first implemented by Google as an SEO ranking signal because most internet connections now have high enough upload bandwidth that people can handle slower download times without experiencing any difficulty with browsing or loading webpages.
This means that investing resources into how well you load on mobile browsers could be worth it since most people access content from their phones nowadays (approx 67% according to Statista) so if your website doesn’t take too long to load this way then you’ll see better rankings.
The quality of your content is what actually determines your high rank
Remember that Google’s purpose is to serve the best information to its users so if you actually comply with the SEARCH INTENT. this is what you should aim for.
You can easily identify what type of content you should create to serve the user by simply doing a Google search on your keywords.
You need to be clear on what type of information is the searcher expecting from the type of query they are asking on google.
these are some examples of search intent.
- Informational
- Preferential/Commercial Investigation
- Transactional
- Navigational
You can read more about search intent on the MOZ blog just click this link on search intent quick guide.
how to speed up WordPress site
Fastest Way To Speed Up Your WordPress Site?
Many experts fall on to the same conclusion about speed on WordPress sites and there are 5 steps to take your page speed insights to score above 90.
Now let me reassure you that this is quite easy, in fact, you can find hundreds of tutorials on YouTube on how to achieve this. the problem is that not all websites are created alike, so what works for them might not actually work for your website.
Here are the 5 steps to have a fast WordPress site if you don’t what to change your Theme!
#1 Upgrade Your Hosting
Many of the issues on speed can be solved by upgrading your hosting, and please don’t use generic low-performing hosting such as GoDaddy, Hostgator, or Bluehost.
here on Onlinetoolguides.com we suggest paying a bit more but get what you actually pay for in performance.
We suggest you check out Siteground and Namehero hosting plans. they have downgrade some plans on specs but they are still top-notch hosting providers. I especially like Namehero for their support team and response times.
Another option you can go for could be Cloud hosting which improves your website speed overall for this I recommend you check out Cloudways.
And yes those are affiliate links so I do get a kickback if you use them.
#2 Install Cashing Plugin
Cashing plugin is one of the plugins you can install that will allow your site to load faster. when a user visits your website it loads all images in the background, then shows them as they scroll down on their browser.
this way its not loading everything at once and choking up from bandwidth usage.
If you have Siteground hosting this will be automatically installed on your WordPress installation and it’s quite good.
But if you are on another hosting provider these plugins might help you get set up very fast.
- LiteSpeed
- WPRocket
Any of these plugins will help your site load a lot faster and they are very easy to use.
#3 Optimize your Images
Images in WordPress can be a huge drag on your site performance.
If you are using images that you have taken, how to make them smaller and more optimized is really simple.
You should also install an image compressor plugin like Imagify or ShortPixel which automatically optimizes any new uploads too for greater speed savings.
These will then resize all of your uploaded photos into small thumbnails with better compression settings so they load a lot faster!
Even they will make web files of your images to make them even faster. so be sure to have all your images optimized.
#4 Use a content delivery network (CDN)
A CDN is basically a network of servers around the world that serve content to your visitors.
To get the speediest results, you should have all files served from as close to their physical location in order for them to download quickly and seamlessly.
I’ll make this short and sweet, if you use WordPress (which 99% of my blog readers do) it is important to know that the CDN service will update your site across all its data centers.
Essentially, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all your static files (CSS and images) from your site and serves them on servers that are closest to the visiting user.
WordPress sites often suffer from slow loading times due to the size of their database.
Cloudflare Content Delivery Network has a solution for that, by reducing load time and even coming with on-demand video tutorials!
Another plugin you can try is the free service provided by BunnyCDN. I haven’t tested it, but it has a lot of good reviews and promises to do the same thing as mentioned above for faster site speeds on WordPress sites.
#5 start Optimizing your homepage to load quickly
The quickest way to improve your WordPress site’s speed is, inevitably, by improving the most-visited page of your site.
Some things you can do to improve your WordPress site’s loading speeds include:
- Instead of showing a full post on your site, consider using excerpts to save the reader’s time and space.
- To page load as quickly as possible, you should aim for no more than 7 posts on the homepage.
- Include social media buttons only in posts, not on the home page!
- Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need in order to improve the speed of your WordPress site.
- Keep your site simple. The best sites are those that only have a few-to-no widgets on the homepage and offer readers easy access to the content they desire.
Designing an awesome homepage for your site is key to accomplishing both top-tier SEO and page load times.
How to Speed up WordPress site No Code Way
This is the fastest way to speed up your WordPress site and it’s very simple! Change Your theme to popcorn.
Have you been looking for a theme that’s fast and easy to use?
Popcorn is the perfect theme for affiliate marketers, content creators, bloggers, and anyone else who wants to make money online. It has all the features you need like an intuitive drag-and-drop page builder, unlimited sliders, video backgrounds, and much more. Plus it’s super fast so your website will load in seconds!
With Popcorn, you can create high-converting websites quickly with no coding knowledge required. You can also easily customize every aspect of your site from colors to fonts without touching any code at all. And if you ever get stuck we have 24/7 support waiting for you on live chat or email – just ask us anything!
Popcorn theme pagespeed advantages
It can be hard to find a good host for your WordPress site.
Most hosts are either too slow, have terrible uptime, or don’t support the latest version of WordPress.
Popcorntheme is different than other hosting companies because we only focus on one thing – speed and uptime. We’re dedicated to providing you with an amazing experience so that you can get back to doing what you love most – creating great content! Our servers are lightning-fast and our uptime is unbeatable. Plus, we’ve got free SSL certificates for all sites hosted with us so visitors will see a green lock in their browser when they visit your site!
Popcorn theme More Traffic to your website
The problem with most social media marketing tools is that they are not content-focused. They’re designed to get you more followers, but don’t really help you create better content.
We know how important it is to be able to make money on social media sites like Instagram and YouTube. That’s why we created Popcorn Theme with a focus on helping people build their audience while creating great-looking posts that will convert and bring in sales.
Popcorn theme has been specially designed for bloggers, vloggers, and any other type of online business owner who wants to grow their following quickly by producing high-quality engaging content.
Popcorn theme simple and functional
The problem with most themes is that they are very difficult to set up or just don’t work the way you expect them to.
If you’re like us, then you’ve wasted countless hours trying to make a theme do what we want it to do and failing miserably.
PopcornTheme was built for people who know how websites should be done. It’s easy enough for beginners but powerful enough for advanced users. We have spent hundreds of hours creating this theme and making sure it works exactly the way we wanted it to!
Is popcorn theme good for ecommerce?
No. this theme was tough tout to be fast and content-driven making it the best theme for blogs and affiliate marketing sites. you need to understand that eCommerce websites are heavy this will always end in slow loading times.
Upgrading Your WordPress Site with the Popcorn Theme.
Notice If your current WordPress has a page builder you will have errors of code when you switch, simply because builders add a lot of code for their visual editors.
Popcorn theme is light and fast which eliminates a lot of unnecessary code from your website. be sure to be just running Gutenberg as the main editor also be careful with other plugins.
If you want to have a fast-loading website, then it’s going to take more than just some basic optimizations like compressing your images. You need an entirely new theme that is optimized for speed and performance. The popcorn theme was designed with this in mind from the beginning, so there are no problems with page speed insights or other issues. Give it a try today!
You might enjoy our article on Content tools
