Tips To Create Optimized WordPress Themes
By page speed, it means how much time a browser is taking to fully load the functional web pages of any given website. Slow-loading websites or the pages that take time to load results in driving the users away from your website and they never come back. On the other hand, web pages or websites that load at a quick speed will get more traffic and this eventually results in better conversion rates. In this blog, we will see some useful tips to optimize WordPress websites. You can also go for our Optimized WordPress theme bundle that contains all premium themes at a very affordable price.
Why Having A Fast Loading Website Is Vital?
Fast-loading websites are not only liked by potential customers and clients but also by Google. There are many other important reasons for having a fast-loading website. Important points to note for optimized WordPress Themes.
It is your first impression
In order to know how your brand or company will be perceived by the audience, it is important to put your first impression right. So for you, it is mandatory to provide an exceptional look as well as a fantastic user experience to the audience. Apart from that, your website’s speed also plays a decisive role. A fast-loading website always makes a user happy whereas, a slow website makes your page untrustworthy and unsafe. You can try our Simple WordPress themes to get the best experience.
It impacts your Google ranking
The speed of your website also affects the Google SERP ranking. As Google uses website speed as one of the ranking factors for websites, a fast website will always help youtube obtain better ranks in the Google search results. Website speed reveals how fast a website responds to web requests. Google recommends page load time to be less than 3 secs. This search engine giant knows that if people are diverted to a slow loading page, it is definitely going to impact the user experience adversely. That is why Google gives great importance to the page loading speed of a website while determining its rankings.
It affects your conversion rates
A number of studies revealed that your website speed has a direct impact on the conversion rates of your business. As compared to slow loading websites, user-prefer to use high-speed websites as compared to slow loading sites. Even a reduction of a few milliseconds can improve your conversion rates. In a study, Walmart revealed that when they decreased their loading speed by 1 sec, they ended up seeing improved conversions by 2%. Optimized WordPress themes can be easily found on our website.
It has an impact on the bounce rate
Bounce rate means the percentage of viewers and users who do not view more than a single page before they leave your site. If a website doesn’t load within a second or two, users often seem to leave that website or close that window. According to BBC, for any extra second taken by the website to load, it will end up losing 10% of its users.
What Causes Your Site To Slow Down
If you are dealing with a slow website, it might be due to the following causes:
1. Use of Unoptimized Images
2. No use Of CDN
3. High Traffic On Website
4. Plenty Of Elements On A Page
5. So Many Ads
6. Inefficient Hosting
How To Test Your Site’s Current Speed
There are many speed test tools that will help you to test your website’s speed.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google’s PageSpeed Insight is a website testing tool that you can use for testing the speed of your website. It ranks your website’s speed in the range of 0 to 100. The higher your website’s score is, the better is your speed. It will not only help you to generate the tests for desktop as well as mobile but also gives useful suggestions for improving the website’s speed. With a lot of information available with this tool, this makes it more useful for expert developers rather than novices and beginners.
GTMetrix
If you are a beginner, GTMetrix will be ideal for you. So if you want to run multiple tests on your website to see its performance, you need to log in. you can run these tests across various browsers, connections as well as locations. The free account will be able to save the previous 20 tests as well as the data associated with it.
after that, you will be able to compare the different test data available with you and get the waterfall charts to help you find the factors that may be slowing your site down.
Pingdom
It is somewhat similar to Google PageSpeed Insights as it also ranks your website’s speed from 0 to 100 but it is much better for beginners as it is much easier to navigate. It has the ability to test based on location and it will tell you the score, your page load time, total requests, page size as well as suggestions to increase your page speed.
WebPageTest
This is a free speed testing tool for websites and includes more advanced data and insights available as compared to other free testing tools. With this tool, you will be able to test your website speed across various devices, locations, browsers, etc. and you will also get the reports generated by the tool as well as insights for identifying the issues for improving the speed of your website.
For This have a look at Fastest WordPress Themes to assist you in creating a fast-loading website. If your website loads quickly, it will attract a large number of visitors and propel your company to new heights. Our templates are feature-rich and multifunctional, so have a look at our selection and pick one that suits your needs.
Various Ways To Create Optimized WordPress Themes For Speed
1. Using A CDN (Content Delivery Network)
CDN is nothing but a set of web servers that are distributed across different geographical locations. These servers provide web content to the end-user depending upon their location. Hosting a website on a single server result in all user requests being sent to the same hardware. This makes the hardware consume more time for processing these requests. Apart from that, when a user is far away from the server, the load time for a website increases. With the use of CDN, the user requests are directed to the server present nearest to the user location. This results in a quicker loading website. This is a bit expensive, yet effective way to get optimized WordPress websites.
2. Optimizing The Image Size On Your Site
For a successful website, images play a vital part as these images as well as graphics add more to the engagement part. The negative side of using images is they are large files causing your website to work slowly. Reducing the image size without compromising its quality will result in faster and optimized WordPress websites. The best way to do that is to use tools such as JPEGmini, Kraken, ImageOptim, etc. It might take some time but it is really worth it. You may also try the other way in which you can use the HTML responsive images and attributes that are useful for adjusting the image size depending upon the user display properties.
3. Reducing Plugins To A Minimum
Although plugins are useful for adding the desired features and functionality to your website, more use of plugins causes more resources to run them, and eventually, your website works slower. Using more plugins can also bring in security issues. So if there are so many plugins on your website, we recommend running a performance test to see which plugins are responsible for the slow performance of your website. The website speed is also affected by the quality of plugins you use. So always try to avoid plugins that load a lot of scripts and generate plenty of database queries. It is best to keep only the necessary plugins and try to keep them up to date.
4. Using Web Caching
If there are many users trying to access your web page at a time, the servers will definitely work slowly and require more time to deliver the content of your website and make your full web page appear. In caching, what you do is, store the current version of your website on the hosting and you present this version until you update your website. This cached web page does not need to send the database requests each time. For every website development platform, the approach is going to be different. You may use the W3 Total Cache or W3 Super Cache plugins for WordPress.
5. Reduce Redirects
Additional HTTP requests are created by website redirects and this adversely impacts your website’s performance. So it is advised to keep the redirects to a minimum or eliminate them entirely. The first thing you need to do is identify all the redirects on your page through a site scan. After that, you must check if those redirects are serving any necessary purpose. You should only leave the critical ones.
6. Reducing Or Eliminating Third-Party Advertisers
If the advertisements are causing your website to slow down and result in visitors bouncing from your website, there is a strong possibility that you will lose your valuable customers. You cannot afford it as your customers are far more valuable than what you would make from third-party advertisers. Too many advertisements annoy the users and the moment your site takes too long to display the content and keeps loading ads, your customers are going to bounce to some other website. So limit the ads to one or two per page. This will help to get optimized WordPress websites.
7. Keeping The Number Of JS And CSS Files To a Minimum
A lot of JS and CSS files lead to a larger number of HTTP requests when the visitors of your website want to access particular files. The visitor’s browser treats these requests individually and makes your website slow. When you reduce the number of JS and CSS files, this definitely works positively for speeding up your website’s performance. When you group all the JS into one and similarly do the same to CSS files, you will see a reduction in the overall number of HTTP requests. You will see plenty of tools available for minifying the JS and CSS files quickly.
8. Detecting 404 Errors
“Page not found” error is known as 404 error. When the accessed content of a page is no longer exists or available, at that time, the hosting provides this message to the search engines or browsers. There are many error detection plugins as well as tools available for detecting the 404 error. As we have discussed earlier that using additional plugins may negatively impact your website’s speed, so it is recommended to run the resource through external tools for detecting errors. You may use Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) for it.
After you have detected all the 404 errors, it is time to assess the traffic generated by them. If the dead links don’t bring any visitors and eventually doesn’t consume the server resource, you may leave them as it is. And if these pages are still bringing some traffic then you should consider setting redirects for the external links and for the internal ones, you should fix the link addresses.
Wrapping Up:
Optimized WordPress Themes are liked by users. But in order to get such websites, you need to know the reasons that are responsible for slowing down your website as slow websites often result in declined conversion rates and increased bounce rates. You may also lose your valuable customers if your website is slow and takes time to load. On the other hand, optimized WordPress websites bring in more traffic as they are also loved by Google and other search engines.
If you have a slow website, it is important for you to know the reasons for that. There are many tools available that let you determine the factors causing your website to slow down. This article gives a brief insight regarding the reasons and measures you can take to have a highly optimized website. Hope you will find it useful. In case you are experiencing issues with your website, you can always reach out to VWThemes.
We have the best premium WordPress themes and some suggestions to help you expand your business and make it successful. These themes are entirely customizable and packed with fantastic features that will help you appear your best and attract more customers. Check out our choice of themes and pick one for your website.
