Web Development Dubai Guide: How To Speed Up Your WordPress Website?
[:en]Is your WordPress site slow? If yes, we need to work on that.
Ohh and if your website loads pretty quickly, can it be made even quicker Every millisecond literally makes a difference. We can measure your site’s performance and see if there is anything else to make it just a wee bit faster. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
Having a website that’s fast is no longer an option. Putting Google aside for a moment let’s focus on your visitors. We all know that people’s attention spans are at historical lows. So low in fact, that when researching some actual statistics, one of the most recent search results to pop up was a Canadian study. It showed the average person’s ability to hold a thought has now been surpassed by that of the common goldfish. Sad but true.
So what does this mean for the average website owner? Simple, it means you need to make sure your website loads as quickly as possible. If you leave people waiting for anything more than a second or two, there’s a good chance they’ll disappear. And once they are gone, chances are, they won’t come back.
Going beyond people’s short attention span, it’s also important to think about the importance of presenting a positive user-experience. It’s really no different than going out to a restaurant for dinner only in this situation, you are serving up web pages instead of a hot meal. People want their information and they want it now.
Before Web Design Agency Dubai tell you how you can make your website a great deal faster, I’ll try to establish the importance of having a fast loading website.
Does Site Speed Matter?
Your website load speed matters a great deal to ensure good search engine ranking and a great user experience. It is a known fact that Google’s search algorithm includes your page load times as one of the many parameters while calculating pagerank. Let’s have a look at what Google has to say about site speed and how it might affect your website and the size of your audience.
Google’s Take On Speed
At Google, they created an experiment to replicate the slowness that accompanies a website or webpage with a bad page load speed.
Google’s team did this by creating a system where the speed is deliberately decreased by injecting a server side delay, which translates to extending the processing time before and during the time that results are returned to the browser.
From the user perspective, it doesn’t matter much whether the results are returned slowly or the ability of their browser to process those results is slow. In effect, you wouldn’t know that it is your browser that is slow and not the webpage, but it creates the same effect as you would if you were on a webpage that loads slowly.
By dropping the load speed from 100 milliseconds to 600 milliseconds, there was a decrease in the number of searches by 0.2% to 0.6%, results averaged over four to six weeks. You might be tempted to question the significance of these results.
It was also discovered that those exposed to a 200-millisecond delay performed 0.22% fewer searches during the first three weeks and 0.36% fewer searches in the second three week period. And with a 400-millisecond delay, the same results followed a decrease of 0.44% and 0.76% in the first and second three week periods. As you can imagine such an impact in the number of searches performed is huge given the scale of Google web search.
Apart from Google several major companies including AOL, Microsoft, Bing and Shopzilla have recognized the importance of having websites that load quickly. You can read more about it here.
How To Speed Up Your WordPress Website
The first step towards speeding up your website lies in figuring out what might be causing the slowness to begin with. The tool you are using to perform your analysis whether it’s one of the three discussed above or an alternative should be capable of providing you with starting point for your investigation.
For the remainder of this post, we are going to cover many of the specific items you can tackle either on your own or with help from someone who has more experience.
It’s always a good idea to change one thing at a time and then measure results again. If you change multiple elements, it’s not always easy to determine the impact of the individual items.
Choose a Fast Web Host
If you want your website to be as fast as possible, it makes sense to begin with a strong foundation. That means picking a host that is not only reliable but who is also familiar with WordPress. The bottom line is that your chosen hosting company can have a dramatic impact on the speed of your site, especially when you start to see an increase in traffic. The more traffic you are experiencing, the more important having a good host becomes.
For most purposes, you can break your hosting options into three different categories:
- Shared hosting
- Managed WordPress Hosting
- Dedicated Server
Shared hosting is typically used for lower traffic websites it’s the least expensive and usually, the least reliable form of hosting. While it might be suitable for a small business website that only sees a handful of visitors each day, an eCommerce site that’s responsible for paying your bills and putting food on your table deserves something a little more robust.
The primary downside to shared hosting is that because of the low cost, hosting companies will typically squeeze as many hosting accounts onto a server as possible. This can often result in increased security risks, slower servers and mediocre customer service. However, despite these drawbacks, shared hosting is the right solution for many websites.
Managed WordPress hosting is the next step up in hosting. It often represents a big upgrade in terms of quality, service and speed.
If you’ve ever managed a WordPress site you’ll know that there are certain maintenance tasks that you are responsible for. Managed WordPress hosting handles all those responsibilities for you. But what about an increase in speed?
Most managed hosts operate servers that are specifically setup to run WordPress as efficiently as possible. This means your website will run much faster that it will on shared hosting. Here are a few other benefits of managed hosting:
- Automated backups are usually included
- Improved scalability in the event of traffic spikes
- Less crowded servers mean your website is much faster
- Malware removal is often included should your site be hacked
- WordPress and plugins are automatically updated
- Top tier customer support
Overall, managed WordPress hosting offers some pretty major benefits when compared to shared hosting. Not only will your website be faster, but for a few extra dollars per month, you’ll worry less about downtime and maintenance tasks. For the relatively small extra cost, managed WordPress hosting can have a tremendous impact on the speed of your website.
Dedicated hosting is at the very top of the food chain. Although the price tag puts it out of reach for all but the busiest websites, there is no arguing the fact that dedicated hosting provides the ultimate in performance, speed, control and security.
What really sets dedicated hosting apart from the other options is that your website is the only one residing on the server. Meaning you’ll never have to worry about competing against other websites for the server resources. You also don’t have to worry about other websites on the same server being hacked and potentially slowing down your site or putting it at risk.
Choose a Well Coded & Fast Theme
While choosing a reliable host is important, so too is selecting a WordPress theme. There are thousands upon thousands of WordPress themes available. Some are available for free while others are only available from premium theme shops.
When picking a theme, speed is important, for sure, but don’t overlook some of the other important considerations such as:
- Cost
- Reliability
- Frequent updates
- Security
- Compatibility with plugins
Taking the above considerations into account, how can you pick a theme that is reasonably fast? Great question. Many premium theme companies have taken the time to have their themes tested. With a little research, you’ll also be able to find some actual test results completed by a third-party. Pick a theme that is fast, but not at the expense of the elements listed above.
As a general rule, you are better to select a premium theme from a well know company. These are most likely to provide a fast and well-rounded solution. Just a few examples are:
Keep Your Site Squeaky Clean
Maintaining a clean WordPress installation is something that’s overlooked by many WordPress website owners, usually because it’s something that can’t be seen. However make no mistake, over time, this can have a dramatic impact on your websites performance.
WordPress uses a MySQL which is a database responsible for storing all the information contained on your website. Without getting too technical, within your database is a series of tables or specific places in which to store information.
For example, all the comments on your WordPress site are contained in a comments table; all your settings are contained in a settings table; individual plugin settings are contained within their own unique tables and finally, your posts, pages and every corresponding revision is also contained within a table.
The more content, the more plugins and the more comments there are on your site, the faster your database will increase in size. Remember, every time you save a draft post, WordPress adds a record to the table (in the form of a revision). It’s not uncommon for a large post to have 6 to 10 or more accompanying revisions. Over time, this can really start to add up.
What’s the problem with lots of tables and records? Well, when WordPress needs to find a specific piece of information contained in the database, it has to search for it. Your database is like a library. The bigger it is, the longer it takes to find the book you are looking for. And every once in a while, someone puts the book back on the wrong shelf, which slows down the process even more.
Luckily, there are plenty of handy plugins available that will clean up and organize all the junk in your database. This can involve optimizing (organizing) tables and deleting unnecessary table records (like post revisions).
Depending on how frequently you add new content, it’s a good idea to establish a regular schedule where you organize and clean your database. Just remember to always backup your database before performing any maintenance. Here are a few popular plugins that can help to keep you WordPress database spick and span:
There is one more thing when it comes to keeping your WordPress website squeaky clean: make sure you delete any themes and plugins that are not in use. Unused themes and plugins are simply unnecessary overhead, not to mention an increased security risk. A simple rule of thumb is that if you are not using a particular theme or plugin, delete it from your server.
Optimize Your Media
Imagine buying a fast sports car and then filling up the trunk and passenger seat with heavy weights. Crazy right? Why buy a fast car and then proceed to load it down with performance depleting objects?
Your WordPress website is no different, except instead of using weights, you are probably using images. That’s not to suggest that you shouldn’t be using images on your website because you should be. However, you don’t need an image that is 5000—6000 pixels and 10MB in size. In fact, 10%-20% of that is usually more than adequate, unless you using a full-screen background image. Even then, your image should be as small as possible.
What frequently happens is that people take a picture using their smartphone or DSLR and upload it straight to their website. This almost always results in an image that is much larger than required. It also means that when someone visits your website, their browser needs to download the same large image. This adds precious seconds to your page load times a situation made even worse if your visitor is using a slower internet connection, like 3G or 4G on a mobile device.
Here are a few options that can make a real difference when it comes to images:
Resize Your Images
Always resize your images before uploading them to WordPress. Depending on your level of sophistication, you could use a program like Photoshop to do this. There are also plenty of lower cost or even free options available. iPhoto is one such option and Snagit from TechSmith is another. With each of these options, all you need to do is open your photo, resize it to something more appropriate and upload the smaller image to WordPress.
Reduce The Quality of Your Image
Your image format should vary depending upon the type of image being displayed. Most of the time, if you are displaying photographs in a blog post on a page of your website, you are better off using the JPG format. For graphics or those situations where quality is more important than anything else, PNG files are usually the best choice. Primarily because they are considered to be a lossless format that is, no degradation of quality.
Most photo editors will allow you to save a PNG image as a JPG file and in the process, introduce compression. This means you can take a very large PNG image, resize it and then save it as a JPG meanwhile compressing the image file size by 20% In most situations, anyone viewing the image on a laptop or smartphone, won’t be able to notice a visual difference unless they zoom in.
Most readers are more than willing to forego a little image quality in exchange for increased speed.
Use a Caching Plugin
If you’ve been around WordPress for any length of time, you have probably heard the term cache thrown around. Cache refers to what are essentially temporary files that can be used to store data.
For example, when you visit a website, your browser will often store some of the data from that website in its cache. Then, when you visit the same website again, your browser will be able to display some of the information much faster than if it had to load it from the original source.
WordPress caching plugins work in much the same way but at a server level. Essentially they create a static version of your content (stored on your server) that can be displayed to visitors.
Without caching, anytime a visitor request information from your website, there is a detailed sequence of events that happens in the background (this is a condensed version):
- A visitor clicks on a link.
- A request is generated for information from your database.
- The information is then dynamically created by WordPress.
- The requested information is then presented in your visitors browser.
There are quite a few more steps involved, but you get the point.
When you use a caching plugin, you eliminate steps 2 and 3, which also happen to be the most time consuming. A caching plugin generates static pages which can be sent to the visitors browser, often resulting in loading times that are significantly faster.
Caching also has the added benefit of reducing the workload of your server, which is why many hosting companies encourage you to use a caching plugin. Some hosting companies, like SiteGround, have even gone so far as to develop their own in-house caching plugin.
Take a look at some of the most popular WordPress caching plugins here:
Hire a Web Developer in Dubai to Optimize Your Website
We covered lots of free options when it comes to maximizing the speed of your WordPress site. But what if you are determined to squeeze every last ounce of speed from your site in order to deliver the best user experience possible?
If that’s the case, we’d like to present one more option for you: hire a Web Developer in Dubai who specializes in Google Page Speed Insights. Then, have them optimize your WordPress theme and make changes in accordance with Google’s recommendations.
Depending how well optimized you site is already, you’ll probably discover that this option won’t set you back more than a few hundred dollars by using a service like UPwork to find an expert. Optimizing your site for Google will also have the greatest impact on your ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Final Thoughts on Speeding Up Your WordPress Website
The internet is a competitive place. Not only are you trying to offer a product or service that is unique, you are also trying to do so more efficiently and faster than your competition.
When it comes to running a successful website, other than security, there are very few things that are as important as a fast website. It all comes down to presenting a positive user experience and keeping Google as happy as possible.
If you have some tips or tricks that you use to keep your WordPress website running as quickly as possible, please share them in the comments below.
[:ar]
Web Development Dubai Guide: How To Speed Up Your WordPress Website?
Is your WordPress site slow? If yes, we need to work on that.
Ohh and if your website loads pretty quickly, can it be made even quicker – Every millisecond literally makes a difference. We can measure your site’s performance and see if there’s anything else to make it just a wee bit faster. But we’ll get to that in a bit.
Having a website that’s fast is no longer an option. Putting Google aside for a moment let’s focus on your visitors. We all know that people’s attention spans are at historical lows. So low in fact, that when researching some actual statistics, one of the most recent search results to pop up was a Canadian study. It showed the average person’s ability to hold a thought has now been surpassed by that of the common goldfish. Sad but true.
So what does this mean for the average website owner? Simple, it means you need to make sure your website loads as quickly as possible. If you leave people waiting for anything more than a second or two, there’s a good chance they’ll disappear. And once they are gone, chances are, they won’t come back.
Going beyond people’s short attention span, it’s also important to think about the importance of presenting a positive user-experience. It’s really no different than going out to a restaurant for dinner — only in this situation, you’re serving up web pages instead of a hot meal. People want their information and they want it now.
Before Web Design Agency Dubai tell you how you can make your website a great deal faster, I’ll try to establish the importance of having a fast loading website.
Does Site Speed Matter?
Your website load speed matters a great deal to ensure good search engine ranking and a great user experience. It is a known fact that Google’s search algorithm includes your page load times as one of the many parameters while calculating pagerank. Let’s have a look at what Google has to say about site speed and how it might affect your website and the size of your audience.
Google’s Take On Speed
At Google, they created an experiment to replicate the slowness that accompanies a website or webpage with a bad page load speed.
Google’s team did this by creating a system where the speed is deliberately decreased by injecting a server side delay, which translates to extending the processing time before and during the time that results are returned to the browser.
From the user perspective, it doesn’t matter much whether the results are returned slowly or the ability of their browser to process those results is slow. In effect, you wouldn’t know that it is your browser that is slow and not the webpage, but it creates the same effect as you would if you were on a webpage that loads slowly.
By dropping the load speed from 100 milliseconds to 600 milliseconds, there was a decrease in the number of searches by 0.2% to 0.6%, results averaged over four to six weeks. You might be tempted to question the significance of these results.
It was also discovered that those exposed to a 200-millisecond delay performed 0.22% fewer searches during the first three weeks and 0.36% fewer searches in the second three week period. And with a 400-millisecond delay, the same results followed a decrease of 0.44% and 0.76% in the first and second three week periods. As you can imagine such an impact in the number of searches performed is huge given the scale of Google web search.
Apart from Google several major companies including AOL, Microsoft, Bing and Shopzilla have recognized the importance of having websites that load quickly. You can read more about it here.
How To Speed Up Your WordPress Website
The first step towards speeding up your website lies in figuring out what might be causing the slowness to begin with. The tool you’re using to perform your analysis — whether it’s one of the three discussed above or an alternative — should be capable of providing you with starting point for your investigation.
For the remainder of this post, we’re going to cover many of the specific items you can tackle either on your own or with help from someone who has more experience.
It’s always a good idea to change one thing at a time and then measure results again. If you change multiple elements, it’s not always easy to determine the impact of the individual items.
Choose a Fast Web Host
If you want your website to be as fast as possible, it makes sense to begin with a strong foundation. That means picking a host that is not only reliable but who is also familiar with WordPress. The bottom line is that your chosen hosting company can have a dramatic impact on the speed of your site, especially when you start to see an increase in traffic. The more traffic you’re experiencing, the more important having a good host becomes.
For most purposes, you can break your hosting options into three different categories:
- Shared hosting
- Managed WordPress Hosting
- Dedicated Server
Shared hosting is typically used for lower traffic websites — it’s the least expensive and usually, the least reliable form of hosting. While it might be suitable for a small business website that only sees a handful of visitors each day, an eCommerce site that’s responsible for paying your bills and putting food on your table deserves something a little more robust.
The primary downside to shared hosting is that because of the low cost, hosting companies will typically squeeze as many hosting accounts onto a server as possible. This can often result in increased security risks, slower servers and mediocre customer service. However, despite these drawbacks, shared hosting is the right solution for many websites.
Managed WordPress hosting is the next step up in hosting. It often represents a big upgrade in terms of quality, service and speed.
If you’ve ever managed a WordPress site you’ll know that there are certain maintenance tasks that you’re responsible for. Managed WordPress hosting handles all those responsibilities for you. But what about an increase in speed?
Most managed hosts operate servers that are specifically setup to run WordPress as efficiently as possible. This means your website will run much faster that it will on shared hosting. Here are a few other benefits of managed hosting:
- Automated backups are usually included
- Improved scalability in the event of traffic spikes
- Less crowded servers mean your website is much faster
- Malware removal is often included should your site be hacked
- WordPress and plugins are automatically updated
- Top tier customer support
Overall, managed WordPress hosting offers some pretty major benefits when compared to shared hosting. Not only will your website be faster, but for a few extra dollars per month, you’ll worry less about downtime and maintenance tasks. For the relatively small extra cost, managed WordPress hosting can have a tremendous impact on the speed of your website.
Dedicated hosting is at the very top of the food chain. Although the price tag puts it out of reach for all but the busiest websites, there is no arguing the fact that dedicated hosting provides the ultimate in performance, speed, control and security.
What really sets dedicated hosting apart from the other options is that your website is the only one residing on the server. Meaning you’ll never have to worry about competing against other websites for the server resources. You also don’t have to worry about other websites on the same server being hacked and potentially slowing down your site or putting it at risk.
Choose a Well Coded & Fast Theme
While choosing a reliable host is important, so too is selecting a WordPress theme. There are thousands upon thousands of WordPress themes available. Some are available for free while others are only available from premium theme shops.
When picking a theme, speed is important, for sure, but don’t overlook some of the other important considerations such as:
- Cost
- Reliability
- Frequent updates
- Security
- Compatibility with plugins
Taking the above considerations into account, how can you pick a theme that is reasonably fast? Great question. Many premium theme companies have taken the time to have their themes tested. With a little research, you’ll also be able to find some actual test results completed by a third-party. Pick a theme that is fast, but not at the expense of the elements listed above.
As a general rule, you’re better to select a premium theme from a well know company. These are most likely to provide a fast and well-rounded solution. Just a few examples are:
Keep Your Site Squeaky Clean
Maintaining a clean WordPress installation is something that’s overlooked by many WordPress website owners, usually because it’s something that can’t be seen. However make no mistake, over time, this can have a dramatic impact on your websites performance.
WordPress uses a MySQL which is a database responsible for storing all the information contained on your website. Without getting too technical, within your database is a series of tables or specific places in which to store information.
For example, all the comments on your WordPress site are contained in a comments table; all your settings are contained in a settings table; individual plugin settings are contained within their own unique tables and finally, your posts, pages and every corresponding revision is also contained within a table.
The more content, the more plugins and the more comments there are on your site, the faster your database will increase in size. Remember, every time you save a draft post, WordPress adds a record to the table (in the form of a revision). It’s not uncommon for a large post to have 6 to 10 or more accompanying revisions. Over time, this can really start to add up.
What’s the problem with lots of tables and records? Well, when WordPress needs to find a specific piece of information contained in the database, it has to search for it. Your database is like a library. The bigger it is, the longer it takes to find the book you’re looking for. And every once in a while, someone puts the book back on the wrong shelf, which slows down the process even more.
Luckily, there are plenty of handy plugins available that will clean up and organize all the junk in your database. This can involve optimizing (organizing) tables and deleting unnecessary table records (like post revisions).
Depending on how frequently you add new content, it’s a good idea to establish a regular schedule where you organize and clean your database. Just remember to always backup your database before performing any maintenance. Here are a few popular plugins that can help to keep you WordPress database spick and span:
There is one more thing when it comes to keeping your WordPress website squeaky clean: make sure you delete any themes and plugins that are not in use. Unused themes and plugins are simply unnecessary overhead, not to mention an increased security risk. A simple rule of thumb is that if you’re not using a particular theme or plugin, delete it from your server.
Optimize Your Media
Imagine buying a fast sports car and then filling up the trunk and passenger seat with heavy weights. Crazy right? Why buy a fast car and then proceed to load it down with performance depleting objects?
Your WordPress website is no different, except instead of using weights, you’re probably using images. That’s not to suggest that you shouldn’t be using images on your website because you should be. However, you don’t need an image that is 5000×6000 pixels and 10MB in size. In fact, 10%-20% of that is usually more than adequate, unless you using a full-screen background image. Even then, your image should be as small as possible.
What frequently happens is that people take a picture using their smartphone or DSLR and upload it straight to their website. This almost always results in an image that is much larger than required. It also means that when someone visits your website, their browser needs to download the same large image. This adds precious seconds to your page load times — a situation made even worse if your visitor is using a slower internet connection, like 3G or 4G on a mobile device.
Here are a few options that can make a real difference when it comes to images:
Resize Your Images
Always resize your images before uploading them to WordPress. Depending on your level of sophistication, you could use a program like Photoshop to do this. There are also plenty of lower cost or even free options available. iPhoto is one such option and Snagit from TechSmith is another. With each of these options, all you need to do is open your photo, resize it to something more appropriate and upload the smaller image to WordPress.
Reduce The Quality of Your Image
Your image format should vary depending upon the type of image being displayed. Most of the time, if you’re displaying photographs in a blog post on a page of your website, you’re better off using the JPG format. For graphics or those situations where quality is more important than anything else, PNG files are usually the best choice. Primarily because they are considered to be a “lossless†format — that is, no degradation of quality.
Most photo editors will allow you to save a PNG image as a JPG file and in the process, introduce compression. This means you can take a very large PNG image, resize it and then save it as a JPG meanwhile compressing the image file size by 20% In most situations, anyone viewing the image on a laptop or smartphone, won’t be able to notice a visual difference unless they zoom in.
Most readers are more than willing to forego a little image quality in exchange for increased speed.
Use a Caching Plugin
If you’ve been around WordPress for any length of time, you have probably heard the term cache thrown around. Cache refers to what are essentially temporary files that can be used to store data.
For example, when you visit a website, your browser will often store some of the data from that website in its cache. Then, when you visit the same website again, your browser will be able to display some of the information much faster than if it had to load it from the original source.
WordPress caching plugins work in much the same way but at a server level. Essentially they create a static version of your content (stored on your server) that can be displayed to visitors.
Without caching, anytime a visitor request information from your website, there is a detailed sequence of events that happens in the background (this is a condensed version):
- A visitor clicks on a link.
- A request is generated for information from your database.
- The information is then dynamically created by WordPress.
- The requested information is then presented in your visitors browser.
There are quite a few more steps involved, but you get the point.
When you use a caching plugin, you eliminate steps 2 and 3, which also happen to be the most time consuming. A caching plugin generates static pages which can be sent to the visitors browser, often resulting in loading times that are significantly faster.
Caching also has the added benefit of reducing the workload of your server, which is why many hosting companies encourage you to use a caching plugin. Some hosting companies, like SiteGround, have even gone so far as to develop their own in-house caching plugin.
Take a look at some of the most popular WordPress caching plugins here:
Hire a Web Developer in Dubai to Optimize Your Website
We covered lots of free options when it comes to maximizing the speed of your WordPress site. But what if you’re determined to squeeze every last ounce of speed from your site in order to deliver the best user experience possible?
If that’s the case, we’d like to present one more option for you: hire a Web Developer in Dubai who specializes in Google Page Speed Insights. Then, have them optimize your WordPress theme and make changes in accordance with Google’s recommendations.
Depending how well optimized you site is already, you’ll probably discover that this option won’t set you back more than a few hundred dollars by using a service like UPwork to find an expert. Optimizing your site for Google will also have the greatest impact on your ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Final Thoughts on Speeding Up Your WordPress Website
The internet is a competitive place. Not only are you trying to offer a product or service that is unique, you’re also trying to do so more efficiently and faster than your competition.
When it comes to running a successful website, other than security, there are very few things that are as important as a fast website. It all comes down to presenting a positive user experience and keeping Google as happy as possible.
If you have some tips or tricks that you use to keep your WordPress website running as quickly as possible, please share them in the comments below.
[:]
