Will the Amount of Media on a WordPress Website Affect Speed?
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) used around the world, and for good reason. It is extremely flexible, allowing content creators to build almost any type of website they can imagine using the widely available plug-ins and themes that are available. It is also incredibly easy to use, providing a nice, smooth learning curve for beginners and an endless array of plug-ins and themes for experienced users.
No matter what type of website you are building, choosing a content management system (CMS) is essential. Without a CMS, you will find it incredibly difficult to publish content (articles, videos, etc.) on your site because all the tasks, such as adding and deleting articles, publishing new content, and changing the overall look and feel of your site, will have to be done manually.
What is more, once you have built your site and started getting content published, you will realize that the system is not as robust as you would like it to be. Because all the tasks must be done manually, you run the risk of making costly errors. For example, if you try to build a site using WordPress and then realize halfway through that it was not the right choice because your host is going to charge you an arm and a leg for the extra bandwidth, you will have wasted a lot of time.
If you need a content management system (CMS) for your wordpress site, then there are plenty of options out there. However, if you are looking for a free option, then WordPress itself is the way to go because it is a widely available, extremely flexible CMS that almost anyone can use. What is more is that WordPress comes with an extensive range of free plug-ins that can be used to add additional functionalities to your site. For example, you can use the Visual Composer plugin to add page elements (e.g., images, videos, and more) to your posts, as well as the Related Posts widget to display content of the same type as the post you are viewing (e.g., related articles, videos, or images).
The Impact Of Media On Website Performance
No one factor alone makes up for poor website performance – there are always multiple reasons why your site may be performing poorly. However, if you are looking to improve your overall speed, then you should make removing media and reducing the amount of files on your site a priority. Indeed, there are several reasons why more and more websites are choosing to remove all forms of media from their site:
Images Take Up A Lot Of Room
One of the most important factors that affect the performance of a website is the amount of space taken up by the various media (e.g., images, videos, and more) that are available on the site. Even if you are using CDN (content delivery network) to host and deliver all the content, the size of the files will still affect the speed of the site. In order to determine how much space images and videos take up on your site, you will need to run a free backup (e.g., Backups by Cloudflare) and file extension analysis (e.g., File Types Explained) tool on your site. You may also want to consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to host and deliver all the images and videos on your site. In addition to taking up a lot of room, images and videos also take a long time to load, meaning that if you have a lot of content published on your site, then it may noticeably slow down the overall performance.
They Slow Down Site Load Times
Even if you have used all the right technical tools to optimize the performance of your site (e.g., minifying JavaScript and CSS), images and videos, which are the primary ways to convey information on the web, can still negatively impact the speed of the site. Because of this, it is highly recommended that you remove all the images and videos from your site (and replace them with something else, such as diagrams, charts, or even words). In addition to taking up a lot of room and slowing down the speed of the site, images and videos also make the site harder to navigate and often result in frustrated users.
They Decrease Mobile Reader Engagement
When someone comes to your site from a mobile device (e.g., smartphone), the experience is dramatically different from when they come to your site from a computer. When someone visits your site from a mobile device, they expect that the content will fit the screen. Even if you have made the text as small as possible and optimized the overall look of the site for mobile viewing, there is still some content that will not fit on the screen. When this happens, the only option available to the user is to zoom in on the page or leave the site altogether because there is no way for them to read the content (e.g., articles, emails, etc.).
Even if you have the best of intentions, sometimes the articles that you write for publication will not fit the screen on a mobile device. Perhaps you meant to write an article for a computer screen but the text is still small enough to be viewed on a smartphone. In this case, you have created a frustrating experience for your readers – they are unable to consume your content in its entirety and must either zoom in or leave the site altogether. While this is generally considered a bad thing, in some instances, it can be a good thing. For example, if you are writing about fashion and the text is small enough to be read on a smartphone, then perhaps your article is best viewed on a mobile device. After reading your article, the reader can then choose to either purchase the products mentioned in the article or visit a store where they can find those products easily.