Website speed matters.

Especially since connection speeds vary depending on how people are viewing your site. Mobile phone browsing is usually a lot slower than using a desk based computer.

And Google takes account of speed as one of its ranking factors.

Sure, website pages are bigger than they were when the internet started to get going and near enough everyone was using dial up modems to browse the web. Then image and page sizes were even more important.

But it’s easy to get blasé and think that website load speeds don’t matter any more.

They definitely do!

You can run tests but they vary considerably and are little more than a snapshot unless you’ve got data that’s been compiled over time and then averaged. The monitoring service I use for some of the sites I’m involved with gives that kind of aggregate statistic.

Or you can get a snapshot with tools like the one at Pingdom – it’s quick, free and gives at least an idea of how your site is performing.

There are several likely causes of a slow loading website.

In no particular order, it’s worth checking these:

• Your website host. If the server is overloaded or they have a less than ideal connection to the main internet services, this can impact on site speed.
• The WordPress plugins you’re using. Cull any that you seemed like a good idea at the time but you don’t actually use. Check that you’re not using bloatware plugins like JetPack that offer a gazillion things you don’t need. Generally have a tidy up!
• Make sure you’re using a cache plugin – WP Super Cache is the one I used to install but I’m moving across to W3 Total Cache. The cache takes a copy of your website page and stores it for a limited amount of time, saving WordPress from having to do all the work it does in the background before showing you a page.
• Check image sizes – if WordPress isn’t displaying a thumbnail image it’s created, there’s a good chance the image sizes are too big.
• If you’re feeling confident and have taken a backup of your WordPress installation then consider running an optimiser plugin. This can work as it cleans up all the behind the scenes things that databases compromise on to keep things working. I’ll be testing one of these in the not too distant future but at the time of writing I haven’t used one.
• Enable compression. You can do this with a plugin like WP Super Cache – it’s in the advanced settings but isn’t switched on by default – or W3 Total Cache. Your web pages are then compressed before they’re sent to your site visitors and then the browser takes care of uncompressing them before they’re displayed. As you may know from using zip files, this can be quite a space saver and it will reduce the time to deliver your site to the visitor, therefore speeding it up.

That list doesn’t take long to go through but can make all the difference on the time it takes for your website to load.

That will help with your website and most of the things I’ve listed are pretty much “set it and forget it” so you won’t have to worry too much about them in the future.

And if you’d like this explained in a series of short videos, click here.