How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website In Under 5 Minutes.

Speeding up a WordPress website is probably the easiest among all the CMS out there.

You can speed up your WordPress website in just a few minutes using any of the hundreds of optimization plugins available on the WordPress ecosystem, but which one should you use?

If you search the WordPress plug-in directory for performance optimization, you will find hundreds of plugins to optimize your images, lazy load images, or minify assets on your website.

All those optimizations are important for your website to load quickly and have a good PageSpeed score.  

But using multiple plugins to optimize your website can make your website WordPress admin slow and usable.

More often than not, these plugins create conflicts that can slow down your website, and they can even cause functional or visual issues.

In this blog post, we will discuss the essential performance optimization techniques you can use to get a lightning-fast website. We would also discuss how you can speed up your WordPress website within 5 minutes using the RabbitLoader WordPress plugin.

Why Does Website Speed Matter?

Your website’s speed matters for more than one reason. 

It’s more than just your visitors being irritated when the website loads slowly, Although your brand is perceived to be less than premium when that happens. These are three major impacts a high loading time has on your website. 

1. Organic Rankings
2. User Experience
3. Conversion Rate

How Website’s Speed Impacts Organic Rankings

 Google weights heavily on page experience in their organic ranking algorithm. Websites with good user experience are much more likely to rank higher on the search engine result pages. 

Page experience is closely tied to the speed of your website; if your website is slow to load or interact, the user experience will be subpar.

A below-average user experience would trigger adverse visitor behavior toward your pages’ bounce rate and dwell time.

As a website owner or SEO, you must make your website technically superior to compete in today’s highly competitive organic search market.

How Website’s Speed Impacts User Experience

User experience is important for your website; it not only influences your SEO but also impacts the business goal of your website.

A good user experience usually translates to a high conversion rate, essential for a good ROI of your SEO campaigns.

Delivering a better user experience starts with loading the website faster, but it does not stop there. Your website must also interact with your users quickly; nobody likes a laggy website.

To do well on the Google PageSpeed Insight your website has to do well in interactiveness along with the low loading time.

How Website’s Speed Impacts Conversion Rate

The bottom line of any business is revenue, no matter how much organic traffic you drive to your website, at the end of the day, the impact of your SEO campaign would be valuated by the revenue it brings in and not just the traffic.

A fast and interactive website can do justice to the SEO effects by converting those organic visitors into buyers.

There are many things you can do to improve the conversion rate on your website; that is a subject on its own.

Improving the speed of your website and making it interact quickly with your visitor’s inputs is the first step towards improving the conversion rate of your website or landing pages.

Is Website Speed the same as PageSpeed Score?

Website speed is not exactly the same as PageSpeed Score.

While website speed is essentially how long it takes your website to load, the PageSpeed score takes two more important metrics into account when scoring your website on a scale from 0 to 100.

Along with the website loading time, PageSpeed scores also take the visual stability and interactivity of your website into account.

To achieve a good PageSpeed score, it is not enough to load your website as quickly as possible; your website has to be stable visually; this means no flashing or layout shifting issues can exist if you are looking to get that sweet green color in google PSI test.

The same applies to the interactivity of your website; it should interact with your visitor’s input, like a click or scroll, as quickly as possible.

What is a Good PageSpeed Score?

Google PageSpeed insights score websites on a scale from Zero to 100.

To be considered to have a good PageSpeed score, a page should score more than 90 on the test.

There are a few other popular tools where you can check the speed of your website, which we will mention in this blog and we will see how you can score over 90 on Google PageSpeed Insights of the RabbitLoader performance optimization plugin.

How to Check Your PageSpeed Score?

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed is the most common tool for testing the speed of your website and the Core Web Vitals.

So, for starters, you get diagnostics that tell you how to improve the PageSpeed. You know you can trust the data as it is right from Google itself. 

GTmetrix

GTmetrix is another wildly popular tool to measure and monitor websites’ performance. 

You can utilize it without creating an account. Simply paste the URL of the page you wish to analyze and commence the test:

They provide an outstanding summary of potential improvements you could make alongside links to resources aimed at helping you address website speed concerns.

Google Lighthouse

Lighthouse is another tool by Google that helps you test the PageSpeed of your website. It is synonymous with Google PageSpeed Insight.

The difference between Google PageSpeed Insight and Lighthouse is that Lighthouse tests your website on their tool and gives you a score from 0 to 100.

Whereas Google PSI gives you the data from real visitors.

Lighthouse is basically the lab data for your website’s performance, and Google PSI is the real-world reflection of how your visitors perceive your website’s performance to be.

Pingdom

Pingdom Website Speed Test is another reliable tool for checking a website’s performance. 

This simple website speed checker grades your website based on how quickly it loads and even suggests a few improvements that you can make to your website.

If you are using a CDN service on your website, you can use the tool to check the performance of your website from different locations, as this tool allows you to change the test server locations before you run the tests.

What is Slowing Down Your WordPress Website?

Once you check the website on Google PSI or on any of the tools mentioned above you will realize many elements of your website are causing it to slow down.

Here is a list of the top reasons for your website to load slowly. Eliminating these causes will help you speed up your website.

• Unoptimized Images

Large images can slow down your website. Images are usually the biggest elements on a page by size. Optimizing them would reduce their sizes and help the pages load quicker.

• Heavy Themes

Poorly coded heavy themes lead to inefficient code execution, thus slowing your website.  Inefficient and unnecessary code causes websites to utilize more resources than required, which slows down your website.

• Poor-Quality Hosting 

Shared hosting is among the cheapest hosting out there, but it is often of low quality with major server issues, which can slow down your website.

• Not Using a CDN

If you are on a cheap shared hosting, a CDN might be your path to the rescue, but most of the time, WordPress websites run without a CDN. 

• Not Utilizing Caching

Caching generally helps store the static versions of your pages; in the case of browser caching, the data is saved on the user’s browser, and it loads from there, too, which gives the user a lightning-fast loading experience and reduces the load on your server.  

• Conflicting Plug-Ins

Installing multiple poorly-coded, resource-heavy plugins can lead to performance issues as each plugin adds extra load to your server and often tries to access the same resource simultaneously. 

Which might cause your website to slow down.

10 Techniques to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

Here are the 10 optimization techniques you can use to speed up your WordPress website. 

You can implement each of them manually or using a plugin, but the smarter way would be to install the RabbitLoader plugin to implement all the techniques on your website with just a few clicks.

1. Optimize Images to Make Them Smaller in Size.

Convert images to next-gen formats like WebP or AVIF to reduce their size without compromising the quality of next-gen formats with lossless compression.

This technique can reduce the size of your images by 30% or even more than its original size.

2. Lazy Load Images for Faster Initial Load Time.

Prioritize loading images, and load images on your website that are not in the visible area of your page only when it’s needed. 

This would prevent your website from loading images onto visitors’ browsers unnecessarily, making your initial load size smaller. A smaller page loads quicker.

3. Use Browser Cache for Faster Loading.

Adding a browser cache makes your website feel faster than it is.

This optimization technique is especially great for a website with mostly static content. It also saves you bandwidth, so if you are on a metered hosting, browser caching can help you save money and make your website quicker.

4. Stop Using Multiple Cache Plugins.

Using a cache plugin is essential to make your website faster, but more often than not, novice users end up installing more than one cache plugin on their website.

Which causes conflicts and might deliver your visitors with stale content.

5. The Content Delivery Network is Faster Than Your Hosting

 Staying on the subject of caching, using a content delivery network makes your website faster,  no matter where your visitor is from.

Let’s say you say your website has a sizable audience in Australia, and your hosting is on a server in the US; the physical distance is big enough for it to load for your website to load slowly.

But if you use a good CDN service, your visitor from Australia would load the website from a node server nearest to them,  which greatly impacts initial load time and helps you achieve a good PageSpeed score.

6. Generate Critical CSS for Your Pages.

 CSS improves the aesthetics of your website, but not all CSS files are required on all the pages of your website.

When you load a page, you are loading all the CSS files on your website, regardless of if its really needed.

It is better to create a critical CSS file that only has the CSS for the critical areas; this can reduce the initial loading file size over 90%.

Critical CSS is essential if you are trying to score over 90 on PageSpeed Insight & there are not many plugins available to generate it effectively.

7. Defer Non-Critical JavaScripts.

Deferring JavaScript is similar to lazy loading; if you can defer the execution of non-critical JavaScript, it helps your website load much faster.

JavaScript takes a lot of resources from the browser. Loading them efficiently reduces loading time.

8. Minify Your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Codes.

 Minifying your HTML, CSS and JavaScript codes can actually help you reduce the space occupied by them. Which would give you a slight advantage when you are trying to load the pages as quickly as possible.

9. Use Compression for Your Website.

It is essential to use a compression algorithm, it reduces the size of your media files smaller.

A smaller file loads quicker, which reduces the high loading time.

10. Stop Using Multiple Performance Optimization Plugins.

Optimizing your website for performance is great, but remember not to go overboard and use multiple optimization plugins, which hurt your website performance and slow it down.

It is better to use a single optimization plugin; using a plugin like RabbitLoader would take care of all the performance optimization needs. 

You wouldn’t need to install different plugins for image optimization, lazy loading, etc.

Why Should You Use the RabbitLoader Plugin to Speed Up Your WordPress Website? 

As mentioned above, RabbitLoader is an all-in-one plugin that helps your website optimize for performance.

You do not need one different plugin for image optimization or another for CDN. All the optimization techniques required to optimize a WordPress website are implemented by the RabbitLoader plugin.

It can optimize all your website pages within just 5 minutes and your website can achieve a score over 90 on PageSpeed insight test effortlessly with RabbitLoader.

Install RabbitLoader now and see how high your website can score on PageSpeed insights.

FAQs