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Every website owner can understand that a faster and more optimized WordPress website can improve SEO ranking and sales conversion, making any website owner satisfied, as well as customers who will come to the website again and again if they like the service, design, and of course speed.
But what happened if you don’t optimize the WordPress website or don’t load as quickly as you expect? I’m sure it will irritate your users, as well as have an effect on your SEO ranking or sales. However, there are also plenty of form factors running in the website background.
Let’s say, some websites have a lot of content on them, such as huge images or videos. But what happens if they don’t optimize your WordPress website images and videos for your website? That type of website would have a slower loading time and a lower score in Google PageSpeed Insights and also affect SEO ranking and sales conversion as well.
Use the following free tools to measure or identify your website score and these tools also provide useful tips after getting your website speed scores so you can find out what things make your website slow.
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Test My Site by Think with Google
- GTmetrix
- Pingdom Tools
- YSlow
- WebPageTest
- web.dev Measure
- Website Speed Test by KeyCDN
- Website Speed Test by Dotcom Tools
Check your WordPress website speed with MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the most popular WordPress plugin that lets you analyze your Google Analytics metric as well as website speed, and other popular features in the easiest way.
MonsterInsights is a very useful plugin it can measure Google Analytics metrics including real-time data, eCommerce tracking reports, user behavior, SEO ranking report, link tracking, form tracking, downloads, and many more features right in the MonsterInsights plugin within the WordPress dashboard, and I say, it’s way better than Google Analytics.
MonsterInsights has added a Speed Score measuring tool into the plugin where you can measure your WordPress website speed scores right from the WordPress admin panel.
(Deal: At WPRiddle.com, our readers get a 50% instant discount on the MonsterInsights plugin through MonsterInsights official website)
To measure your WordPress website speed scores using MonsterInsights plugin, first, you need to get the MonsterInsights plugin, the MonsterInsights plugins are also available for free to download from here and include sessions & pageviews reports, but you don’t get advanced features like Addons, eCommerce Tools, Users Behaviours, a conversion tracking, Search Console report, Site Speed Scores, and many other features which required MonsterInsights license.
Once you get your MonsterInsights license key, then you can start using each and every feature of MonsterInsights plugins, but here I will only show you how to check your WordPress website speed with the MonsterInsights plugin. Once you install and activate MonsterInsights plugins from your WordPress dashboard, then you need to connect MonsterInsights with Google Analytics, then follow the simple steps to setting up MonsterInsights for your website.
To measure your WordPress website speed scores, go to Insights > Reports > Site Speed, there you will see the full website speed score for desktop and mobile after clicking on “Run Audit” to measure the scores. Below the metrics, you also get recommended tips to improve your WordPress website speed score, see the below image:
You can also follow the below useful tips and guide on how to speed up your WordPress website or improve website speed for Core Web Vitals.
1. Choose Web Hosting Provider Wisely
A website running on a fresh WordPress installation will be incredibly fast if you select the right web host. Both on the front end and in the WordPress admin dashboard, pages can load in less than two seconds. However, when you begin to add content to your website, loading times will also increase means y our pages can take longer to load as they become more complex and heavy.
Choosing the best hosting companies also plays a major role in website performance where some hosting companies are very expensive, some offer different features, and some offer useful features at a cheap and reasonable price which is best suitable for beginners, while some of the other hostings are best in their industry offers managed and cloud hosting with promising speed.
There is a lot of thing going around the web hosting companies. The first and all is pricing, web hosting costs play a major role in website performance and optimization. As I told you earlier, some companies cost more than $100 per month and offer managed or cloud hosting or dedicated hosting, while some of the companies’ plans are available at less than $5 per month.
However, the price does not decide the level of service you will receive. Beyond your budget, there are many considerations to consider when choosing a web hosting provider, including plans, support, feature availability, and performance.
There are several web hosting companies out there where that offer a range of plans, including Shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS or Dedicated hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Managed to host.
For beginners who are just getting started with their website, shared hosting is the most cost-effective option for beginners. Shared hosting allows users to share server resources with other users, but it has the drawback of making you rely on the other websites on the server.
WordPress hosting is specially designed for an optimized website but it still shares the same similarities as shared hosting does, while VPS or Dedicated hosting offers more resources as you need where you can set several RAM, CPU, Storage, etc. of your choices.
Cloud hosting combines the simplicity of shared plans with superior scalability. You can gain access to more resources as you need them since your website will be distributed across many servers. And Managed hosting takes care of your website maintenance and performance, so you can only and only focus on your website, while Managed hosting is much more expensive
2. Choose Right Theme and Plugins
Everyone loves website design & style that’s why people are looking for the best WordPress Theme in terms of theme design, features, speed, regular updates, and most importantly customization. There are more than thousands of free themes available in the WordPress repository while some premium themes are also available in some markets which will start from $9 – $60 or more than that if themes offer some extra features.
Plugins also play a major role in WordPress website because it expands website capabilities with different plugins. There are more than fifty thousand plugins available in the WordPress plugins repository that offer free as well as premium while some plugins are also available in 3rd party markets that also expand website features. Using fewer plugins on WordPress websites performs faster speed loading times, so only install the necessary plugins as you need.
3. Optimize Images
The website can be easily optimized by compressing images or videos with tools like ShortPixel or TinyPNG, and TinyJPG, which are the best tools for compressing images into smaller sizes without sacrificing image quality. However, this does not mean that compression tools should be used to optimize any website. If your website still takes a long time to load after compressing or optimizing the images, you might consider using a cache solution or plugin.
4. Use Browser Caching
Browser cache can store the original content of your web pages in the visitor’s browser that allows visitors to load that original page faster once they visit again and again rather than loading the full original page content, so using cache on a WordPress website can get an extra score in PageSpeed which makes your website loads faster.
A free cache plugin is available in the WordPress plugins repository, including some popular cache plugins such as W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, WP Super Cache, WP-Optimize, Autoptimize, SG Optimizer (Only works with SiteGround hosting), and Breeze created by Clowdways.
5. Use CDN to Optimize WordPress Website
So, if you want to upload high-quality images or videos without compromising on quality or size, then you must have a CDN (Content Delivery Network) tool like StackPath CDN, Cloudflare free CDN, WordPress CDN by Jetpack, Google Cloud CDN, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Microsoft Azure CDN, Sucuri, KeyCDN, CacheFly, and BunnyCDN, which will be helping load your website much faster with their global edge server around the world. Now you think, What is CDN? And How it works?
Simply, CDN cut loading time by using a copy of your website content which is stored on global servers, once visitors come to the website then these global edge servers serve a copy of the website to them without calling the original server which is located only in one place but CDN uses global edge servers means visitors get your website content from the nearest global edge server to loads web contents faster.
CDN is a geographically based proxy server network and data center. The CDN provides high usability and efficiency by spatially distributing the service relative to end-users. CDN makes it possible to easily migrate the assets necessary to load Internet content, including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos. The popularity of CDN services continues to grow, and today most web traffic, including traffic from major sites such as Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon, is served by CDNs.
CDN servers help website visitors to quickly access the website content with much better and faster speed, by optimizing all contents. Having a CDN server on your website will benefit you and your visitors because your audiences love to visit your website using better speed, thanks to global edge servers.
CDN server also helps to reduce bounce rates and increase the amount of time that people spent on your website. CDN server also reduces the cost of Bandwidth on your server side, CDN server will reduce the amount of data on the origin server, which means it will reduce the hosting cost for you. If you want to use Cloudflare CDN, it will help you against DDoS attacks and improve security and optimization.
