It Takes So Long for a Page to Load in WordPress – What Can You Do?
There’s nothing worse than trying to read or write an article on a slow, unresponsive website.
Just imagine how frustrating it would be if the page took 40 seconds to load, or 1 minute—the kind of time it takes to really read the content. You’re wasting precious writing time, and you’ll have to keep stopping to hit that “refresh” button.
The last thing you want is to lose readers, so it’s vital your website is as quick and convenient as possible. Thankfully, there are a number of things you can do to make sure your site speeds up, without affecting too much the overall look and feel of your writing.
Optimise Your Images
It might be trendy to use tiny images in your blog posts these days, but it’s not always the most practical choice. While those tiny images can be fun to look at, they’re taking up a ton of room on your server, and bogging down your site.
Instead of using tiny images, try using large, high-quality images that are stored in a cache. When a user visits your site, the image will already be there – saving you the time and effort of having to load it again from the server.
Reduce The Number Of Plugins You Have Installed
Plugins are apps or tools that extend the functionality of your site. They can speed up your blog, or provide other functionality such as email subscription, or photo galleries. However, many plugins can be a pain to manage—especially if you’re not tech-savvy. If you’re looking for a free, easy solution, try the WP Ultimate package from Bluehost. This lets you install as many plugins as you want, as long as you have the technical know-how.
Minify And Combine Your CSS And JS Files
Web developers refer to these files as “resources” because they’re essentially building blocks that make up a website. Typically, these resources are separate files that are loaded individually by the browser. This results in a number of requests being made by the browser, slowing down the site.
To speed up your site, combine all of your CSS and JS files into a single “master” file. Doing this takes a bit of work, but the benefits are huge. When a user visits your site, their browser will make a single request for the combined file, rather than making separate requests for each individual file. This can result in a significant performance boost.
WordPress comes fully equipped with a built-in feature that allows you to combine and minify all of your CSS and JS files. From the dashboard, go to your site’s resources and select the Combine button. Doing this will create a single, minified CSS and JS file that you can upload to your site. Alternatively, you can download the CSV file and upload it to your development system.
WordPress also has a built-in feature that allows you to shorten your site’s URLs. Go to your site’s URL and click the Shorten URL button, or open up the WordPress toolbar (Press Ctrl+U to open it up). Once there, you can enter your preferred URL shortener, and start using that instead of long, cumbersome domain names.
Avoid Overuse Of Tables
It’s a common mistake to use tables for the layout of your blog posts. In most cases, you don’t need tables for this – you can achieve the same with CSS. The issue with tables is they’re difficult to style. You have to specify certain values for each cell in the table – like width, height, and alignment. This is definitely not the case with CSS. For instance, if you have a two-column blog layout, you could use the first column for the articles and the second for the sidebars. The advantage of this is you can change the layout as often as you like, without having to go back and edit the code itself.
Use Proper Fonts
Fonts are used to style text, and they have a significant impact on a site’s overall look. If you want your text to appear bold or large, you can use a bold font. Incorporating a larger font might also influence the way your content looks. To avoid this, always use the exact same font in your text as you do in other parts of your site. Incorporating a different font for the sake of bolding text would result in a jumbled impression. So, while it’s tempting to use a different font to spice things up, keep things simple.
Avoid Using One Big Script
Scripts are functional tasks that can be added to your web pages to make them work better. For instance, you could use JavaScript to change the alignment of your content, add a scrolling effect to a section of your page, or even create a lightbox popup. These types of things can be useful, but they also make your site heavier. So if you have a choice, avoid using scripts on your site. They might be the cause of some performance issues.
The Bottom Line
What you want to keep in mind is that Google – and all search engines – hate slow, unresponsive websites. Having a site that takes a long time to load or is otherwise unresponsive can seriously hurt its SEO. Even if you’re not keen on that idea, you should still try and make your site as snappy as possible. It really doesn’t take that much effort, and the results are well worth it.