How many times have you exited a site just because it takes a long time to load? Finding its substitute in a few seconds is really simple. We have talked about the site speed many times when talking about how important it is to the user experience and similar topics.
But we would like to dedicate today’s article to the site speed only and mention a few reasons why it is so popular.
Search ranking
Site speed impacts many aspects of your site, the biggest one being poor search engine ranking. That means when a person tries to view your site, and the loading time is just taking too long, he and every other viewer after him will exit the site in the search for a better one, offering potentially the same content.
With that, your site will rank lower in search engines since it has a low amount of visitors.
Since Google has worked so hard on delivering us our information as quickly as possible, it is only logical that they will push faster sites at the top of your search results. There are many tests, which help you gain an insight into your site’s speed.
Conversion
The second reason why site speed is so important is the conversion rate. Conversion is the number of visitors who visit your site with a certain intention and leave your site with executing it. For example, buying a product, sharing a blog, or anything else.
Many types of research online have shown that the best site speed, to optimize the conversion rate, is somewhere between 1 to 4 seconds. As the seconds get higher, the conversion rate drops significantly. If you are wondering why your conversions are low, Sytian Web Developer Philippines suggests doing a speed test to make sure it is the speed that is affecting it.
Loyalty
Another important aspect that site speed might drastically affect is the customer’s loyalty. Your site visitors need to have maximum trust. Especially for those of you who might be owning an e-commerce store, your visitors/customers need to believe in you; after all, they give you their money for a certain product/service. No one is willing to spend their money on a site that takes forever to load, making it unprofessional and untrustworthy.
These are the three most important aspects which can be under the influence of the site’s speed, but there are many more. Now that we have covered what the speed affects let us also mention some of the things that might affect the speed itself.
The first thing is the site weight. If you overflood your site with numerous CSS files, long videos, high-quality pictures, it will for sure result in lower site speed. Adding too many ads on your site is also a big no-no. It is okay to insert a few ads, which may result in monetization, but being flooded with tons of ads while going through a site will bore anyone.
Another thing that may slow your site down that might not even be your fault is bad hosting. Make sure you are investing in good hosting, including performance optimization, next to everything else a hosting should offer. If you are using a WordPress site, there are also many factors to look at. Some of them are your WP site’s theme, too many plugins, and much more.
Best WordPress plugins for speeding up a site
Now that we have covered all of this, we would like to give you a few plugins to help you achieve a faster site, therefore more of the above-mentioned aspects.
How these plugins work affects some features on your sites like cache, lazy loading, minification, and similar things. Let us take a look at these plugins, shall we?
WP Rocket
The first on our list should definitely be WP Rocket. It is advertised as the most powerful caching plugin out there.
As soon as you activate this plugin, it optimizes the speed of your site significantly, without any kind of additional configuration. It is perfect even for the biggest beginners to use with ease. Even if you have any problems using this plugin, you have a strong, professional support team behind you to not have to sweat.
Over one and a half million sites use this plugin because of its great features. Speaking of features, when first installing it, you receive a lot of features right off. The cache slowing down your site is gone right after installation. This plugin also compresses your site on the server to make it smaller and then decompresses it on the browser. This makes your files smaller without destroying anything but makes their content faster to be seen by the viewers.
This plugin is compatible with almost all of the other WP plugins and can also be used with almost any hosting service. Next to all of these features, it also can affect your site’s media, database, preloading, add-ons, and much more.
A lot of features are offered here, and the prices are very reasonable. They offer three price plans: „Single, “„Plus, “and „Infinite. “ They differ from each other in the number of sites you can support and update. So, for example, the „Single“ plan can only support 1 site, which costs $49/year. The second plan can support 3 sites and costs $99/year. The last and the biggest plan does not have a limit on the number of sites you can manage. It is definitely worth giving it a try, and hundreds of thousands of online reviews agree with us.
Perfmatters
Perfmatters is another great plugin for speed optimization. It is a minimalistic page when it comes to the dashboard, but its features are everything but that. It is straightforward to use, and people do not need any additional knowledge in this field to use it. They are all about decluttering, making sure nothing unnecessary slows your site down.
Just like the one above, it is compatible with all themes and plugins, working perfectly. If you find yourself having any issues trying to find your way around this plugin, a professional support team with a long work experience will be at your service.
This plugin works in a pretty simple way. For example, it disables all of the features that you might not be using, making sure they do not slow you down. It also downsizes your page size and the number of HTTP requests. All of this can be achieved by simply turning switches on and off. Better explained, you get a long list where all of your features are listed, and you can simply turn off all of the features that you do not want to slow your site down.
A new addition to this plugin is database optimization, where you can delete posts, pages, deleting drafts, cleaning up comments, optimizing your database tables, and much more. Lazy loading is another issue this plugin can help you with. Any other information that you think is crucial for your needs and want to see if this plugin offers them can check out on their site.
This plugin offers three price plans. „Personal, “„Business, “and „Unlimited sites. “ Just like the plugin above, the plans differ from each other, based on the number of sites you can support. So the first plan supports only one site and costs $25/year, the second plan supports three pages and costs $55/year, and the last plan supports an unlimited amount of pages and costs $125/year.
WP Fastest Cache
The last plugin we would like to mention is the WP Fastest Cache plugin. Over a million users can say how good this plugin really is. This plugin offers many features, but their choice is based on the plan you choose to get. The first plan is „Bronze, “the second „Silver, “and the third is „Gold. “ They support one, three, and an unlimited amount of sites. The prices go from $50, $125, and $175. All these amazing features you can check out on their website and see the table of features yourselves. This plugin was mention-worthy since it offers a free version and offers great features it.
Conclusion
We hope that you have found this article helpful and that we have given you a better insight on what site speed is, what affects it and how to optimize it. We also hope that you consider trying out one of the plugins we have mentioned above as well as the services of BizcaBOOM, a Houston SEO agency.