Crazy Easy Speed Hacks to Boost WordPress Site Vitals Score

A recent study by Sean Work, the former Director of Marketing at Kissmetrics, you could lose nearly half of your visitors if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load. (1)

Here are some interesting facts and stats:

• 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
• If an eCommerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

Now, do you know your page speed? Do you know how to find out your page speed?

In this article, you’ll learn how to check your page speed and how to boost your page speed.

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How to Check your Page Speed in WordPress

The easiest way to check your page speed in WordPress is installing MonsterInsights.

What is MonsterInsights?

MonsterInsights is a plugin that allows you to easily add, customize, and manage Google Analytics on your WordPress site. It’s 100% free to use & download, but if you upgrade to the pro plan then you can also check page speed.

This page speed report will provide:

• Server response time
• Visual elements loading speed
• Time to interactive
• Total blocking time

The report also shows the problem and its solution. For example, review your WordPress hosting may increase speed of server response time. Optimize image size can improve speed of visual elements loading speed.

Great things about MonsterInsights is you can find solution to the problem by using this plugin.

Moreover, Google will add new considerations for the SEO approach. The new SEO approach is called Core Web Vitals such as:

• Loading – how long your website takes to display all of the contents?
• Interactivity – how long your website takes to submit a form, click a link, or tap on a button?
• Visual stability – how long your website takes to display all of the fonts or images?

Speed up your WordPress site directly affect Google search ranking. What does it mean to your business? By optimizing these Core Web Vitals and speed up your WordPress, your SEO ranking may improve!

Well, how to do it? Here are super easy ways to speed up your site.

How to Speed Up your WordPress and also Improve Core Web Vitals

1. Check your site speed

At first, check your site speed and understand the current problem. As I mentioned earlier, I highly recommend MonsterInsights. It’s one of the best user-friendly WordPress analytics plugins in the market.

2. Check your WordPress hosting

WordPress hosting plan has two types, shared and managed.

Shared Hosting is like PO Box at the post office and Managed Hosting is like your own mailbox at home. With Shared Hosting, you share a building with others but still have your own mailbox. With Managed Hosting, both building and mailbox are yours.

How does it impact your website?

With Shared Hosting, if someone else received too much mail you may experience a delay getting your mail. With Managed Hosting, you don’t really get impact by others. If your website has a lot of images or videos, managed WordPress hosting can be a great solution.

Note: Shared hosting is enough for hobby sites, online business card types of business websites, or simple portfolio websites.

3. Install caching plugin

If you have a problem with Response Time, give the caching plugin a try. A caching plugin saves static HTML pages of your website on a server. So, your site visitor doesn’t have to load the whole page every time they visit your site.

4. Optimize images

If you have a problem with Visual Stability, give the optimize images plugin a try.

Big size images on your WordPress site can slow down your page speed, so make image size smaller by using optimize images plugin. You may think you don’t have many images on your WordPress, but WordPress automatically creates a lot of thumbnails for some reason.

5. Reduce Display Ads on your WordPress site

According to a report by Ad Lightning, 40% of display advertisements slow down websites. (2) If you use multiple display ads, disable them one by one and see which one slows down your page speed.

Wrapping Up

Every WordPress configuration is different. You might have a lot of plugins, heavy themes, slower hosting, or third-party tracking scripts, etc. Every WordPress has a different reason for slow page loading. Check your site speed score and identify the specific reasons that slow down your site. And fix the problem & improve!

Resources:

1. Patel, N. (2021, March 10). How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line. Neil Patel. https://neilpatel.com/blog/loading-time/?lang_geo=us
2. StatusCake Team (2020, November 5). Over 40% of Online Advertisements Slow Down Websites. StatusCake. https://www.statuscake.com/blog/over-40-of-online-advertisements-are-too-large-and-slow-down-websites/