Why Performance Matters for your WordPress Website
If you’re a business owner with a WordPress website, there are a number of areas in which you should pay attention to make sure your website is acting as the best sales & marketing tool it can be.
One of those key areas is the performance of your website.
A slow loading website can be bad for business for a number of reasons. First, a slow site will frustrate your customers and drive them away. Second, a slow site will hurt your search engine ranking, resulting in fewer visitors. Finally, a slow site can actually cost you money in lost sales as most web users expect a fast loading website and have very little patience for one that is slow to load.
You can easily check the performance of your website by entering your URL (the “www” address) into a performance monitoring tool. There are many to choose from, I like GTMetrix.
Try it! Enter your URL here
The ratings are pretty self explanatory. If you’re getting “A’s” you know that’s much better than getting “D’s”.
Why Performance Matters
There are three main reasons your WordPress website should be performing well: for the benefit of your customers, for the benefit of your search engine ranking, and for the benefit of your wallet. In this article, we’ll take a look at each of those reasons in more detail.
1. Improve User Experience
One of the most important reasons to care about performance is that it directly impacts user experience. If your website takes too long to load, visitors are likely to click away before they even see what you have to offer. In fact, a study by Akamai found that just a one second delay in page load time can result in a 7% decrease in conversions.
2. Improve SEO Ratings
Another important reason to care about performance is that it can impact your website’s SEO ratings. Google has stated publicly that site speed is a factor in their ranking algorithm. That means if your website is slow, you could be missing out on valuable organic traffic from potential customers who are searching for your products or services online.
3. Reduce Bounce Rate in Google Analytics
Bounce rate is a metric in Google Analytics that measures the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can be an indication that something is wrong with your website, and it’s something you should aim to improve. One way to reduce your bounce rate is by improving your website’s performance so that visitors have a better experience on your site and are more likely to stick around and explore other pages.
What are the “Performance Usual Suspects”?
There are many factors that can contributed to poor performance on a WordPress website, some far more technical than others. Here are the top three “usual suspects” that can often be addressed easily and should have a positive impact on your website’s performance.
Cheap Website Hosting
One of the main factors that affects website performance is the hosting service you choose.
While there are many low-cost hosting services available, these often come with a number of drawbacks that can negatively affect your website’s performance. For example, many low-cost hosts offer limited storage space and bandwidth, which can cause your website to slow down or even crash if it experiences a surge in traffic. In addition, most low-cost hosts do not offer features like caching and compression, which can also degrade website performance.
Non-optimized images & graphics
Images that are not compressed or optimized can negatively impact a website’s performance for a number of reasons. First, uncompressed images can take up a lot of disk space, which can slow down your website. Second, uncompressed images can take a long time to load, which can frustrate your visitors and cause them to leave your website.
WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins are a great way to add new features to your website without having to write any code. However, if you’re not careful, they can also quickly become a drag on your site’s performance. That’s because each plugin adds its own code that needs to be loaded every time a page is requested. So, if you have a lot of plugins installed, or if any of them are poorly coded, it can slow down your website. In some cases, it can even bring it to a standstill. That’s why it’s important to be selective about the plugins you use and make sure they’re well-optimized for speed. Otherwise, you may find that your site’s performance suffers as a result.
Conclusion:
As you can see, there are many good reasons to care about performance when it comes to your WordPress website. If you’re not sure where to start, we recommend examining the “Ususal Suspects” above which may offer a quick boost in your performance.
An easier way to improve your website’s performance is by signing up for our WordPress Performance & Security program here. This monthly service focuses on optimizing your website’s performance, enhancing your site’s security (monitoring for malware), installing spam filters to reduce the amount of spam your site receives, we also provide “fix & change” service – making a few changes to your site each month, and – most important – RESCUE; we answer your 911 call should your site ever disappear, become unavailable or appear to have been hacked. Learn more here.