Many entrepreneurs have come to the realization that online is the way to go if they want to reach out to a huge customer base, and grow their businesses. For that reason, they are embracing the need to set up websites for their companies. It’s a great platform to sell their products and services.
Setting up a website is a good idea but just like many other innovations, it ought to be done right. Doing it right ensures that it serves the purpose that it was meant to, and its main purpose is to help a business attract many customers. For that reason, a website should be user-friendly and have all the information that a customer will be looking for on visiting it.
One of the major factors that determine whether your website will serve the purpose that it was meant for is Speed. A huge percentage of the visitors coming to your website will be on the go, or in need to get information within the shortest time possible.That’s how things should be because the internet comes to make operations easier and faster, and an SEO Firm will help you achieve it.
You will hence be in a difficult position if your website is sluggish, and giving visitors a hard time when they move from one page to the other in search of the solutions that they need.
The good news, however, is that you can rectify the problem of your slow site by implementing the following simple ideas, and make your website effective and efficient. Your potential customers will have an easy, comfortable and enjoyable time when they visit your website.
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- Go To A Good Host
In a layman’s language, a host is like a warehouse where you store your resources, which you remove and return in bits in your daily operations. If the warehouse is closed at times without notice, it means you won’t be able to work. When its door is partly closed, it means you will struggle to remove and return your things, and hence take longer to finish your operations. A warehouse that is always open will hence enable you to work without a hitch.
A host, therefore, will store your website resources for use by any visitor who logs in when in need of your services. You should hence choose a host that offers 99.9% uptime, meaning that whenever your visitors go online they will access your site without a problem.
- Go for A Solid Framework
A framework with fewer features like the current 2015 framework is the best. You might even fail to use some of the features. The current framework is lightweight and hence will enable your site to be speedy too.
- The Caching Plugin That is Effective
The plugins on WordPress are very important. The best are in the category of caching. They improve the loading time, and the good thing is that on WordPress.org, they are all free and simple to apply.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
All major blogs use CDN all the time because it helps their visitors access and gets information faster. Content delivery network collects all static files like JavaScript, CSS, and images to deliver them to your downloading visitors faster. They do it by storing the files on servers closer to the user.
- Automatic Image Optimization
The optimizer we are talking about here is like Smush.it used by Yahoo!, which reduces the sizes of images on a website but still retains the high quality. Visitors will, therefore, be able to access images faster.
You hence don’t have to go through the struggle of resizing your images on the website one after the other.
- Homepage Optimization
Your homepage is where your visitors will land first. You hence should give them the best experience by optimizing it so that it can load faster. The speed should also reflect on all other pages.
A quick home page should have fewer posts, excerpts of the posts so that visitors get a glimpse of what the site is about, no unnecessary widgets and plugins too.
- WordPress Database Optimization
A plugin such as WP-Optimize will do multiple tasks in one go. You will hence avoid working on elements of your site like Posts, Spam, Revisions Tables and Drafts individually, just to ensure that they are in a good state.
A plugin like WP-DB Manager will also set a specific date when this optimization will be done, and so you need not worry about having to remember and run the process.
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- Put Expire Header on Static Resources
This header specifies a time that a resource is still accessible and usable. In that case, a visitors’ browser won’t have to fetch static content when it can’t even use it. The visitors will hence access what they need and can use in the shortest time possible.
- LazyLoad For Your Images
This allows the image that is above the fold to load and be visible. They can then continue to scroll to the rest of the information while the other images load when they come into view.
The advantage of this is that the pages will load faster, and the visitors can also save on their bandwidth given that they can opt to ignore the rest of the images when they find what they were looking for.
- Manage the Storage Of Post Revisions
Before you settle on the final draft of the post you want to appear on your page, you will have done a bit of revision. Some content managers store those revisions too, and if they pile up they will slow down the speed of your website.
The best thing is to use a plugin like Revision Control that minimizes the storage of post revisions. You can set them to 2 or 3 revisions.
- Deactivate Trackbacks and Pingbacks
WordPress communicates to other blogs by default, and those blogs have trackbacks and pingbacks. When another blog mentions your site, the site receives notification and updates it in the related post. You can imagine the numerous blogs that may send such information in a day. Those activities will certainly overload your site and make it slow.
The solution is to turn the trackbacks and pingbacks off. They won’t mess up with your backlinks.