Need to speed up your WordPress website?
We received an urgent request from one of our regular customers over the Easter weekend. His team had built a new WordPress website, which was great except for one thing. It took forever to load, and potential customers were being discouraged and leaving the site because they didn’t want to wait. The high bounce rate was leading to poor rankings in Google.
Having worked with us before, he knew that he could rely on us to quickly identify the problems and put some solutions in place. So he contacted Outerbridge and asked us to spend half a day working on his site to optimise the speed. Half a day later, he had a much faster website! Plus a list of recommendations of things he could do himself to speed things up even more. We even included some Search Engine Optimisation recommendations to boot. We made a huge number of technical changes, including optimising 361 images and adjusting the caching protocols.
The net result was a 65% improvement in the page load time.
Yes, you read that right…65%!
6 things you can do to speed up your WordPress website
If you have a slow website, there are a few things you can do yourself to try and speed things up, even if you are not a web developer. For example,
1. Measure your site speed using an appropriate tool and review any pointers the tool generates – GT Metrix is a great free tool for this.
2. Delete any unused themes
3. Delete any plugins that you don’t need
4. Make sure that when you upload images to your site, they are not too big. Images are resource-hungry.
5. External calls (where your website goes off to another website to get a resource e.g. an image) will slow your website down, so don’t have too many of these on your site.
6. Finally, but most importantly, use a reliable, fast website hosting service!
Get help with making your website faster
Our customer had spent a fair bit of time trying to sort out the issues, but found that without being a WordPress expert, he wasn’t sure which changes were helping and which were making it worse. A quick Google had confirmed that some of the changes he required were very technical and needed a reliable web developer who could get straight to the heart of the problems. So he asked us to help.
We know exactly where to look. We run a series of initial diagnostic tests to see which elements of the website might be slowing it down. It could be coding errors, images which are too big, dodgy plugins or technical caching issues, for example. Most often, it’s a combination of lots of factors. We change one thing at a time and then run a series of performance tests to measure the effect of our changes.
We specialise in quickly getting to the root of your WordPress issues and fixing them faster than you could ever hope for. And we fix things fast, so that you don’t have to worry about them and you can get on with growing your business.
To speak to us about how we can speed up your WordPress website, give us a call on 01626 572572 or email us.
Photo Credit: David441491 via Compfight cc
