During our 8 years working on WordPress websites, we have noticed 80% of wordpress websites are never optimised especially ones coming from overseas.
In some instances clients with bloated images & plugins overload causing visitors to wait along time to load up the WordPress website and to make things worst they are on a shared economy host where serve speed is already slow making nearly the site unusable for visitors. If you don’t take care of your WordPress speed performance then Google will penalise you when it comes to SEO rankings. It’s important to factor in that most visitors these days are coming from mobile devices so it is important that you take care of load times as they visiting from slower internet connections.
Top 5 reasons why websites load slow on WordPress:
Web hosting: Web hosting is hosted overseas, budget shared hosting on slow server, high traffic on other websites on your server, hard drive out of space, memory is maxing out
Plugins: Many developers or bloggers rush their work mainly due to budget constraints. Causing your website to load slow with many plugins, bad plugins, un-suppported plugins, buggy plugins and too many plugins active
Images & Media: Images and media can be a big delay as images are alot bigger to download then website code. Some images can be 10 times the size of the homepage mainly from loading it directly from their phones.
Errors & bugs: If your website is throwing WordPress errors then it is causing delays in your WordPress website load times
Not Optimsed: A advanced web developer will know how to optimise both websites files, plugins and also images better then what photoshop can offer. Usually 30% savings on file load times which is quite a lot especially for header images.
If you want to test your website load times we recommend two websites:
https://www.pingdom.com/
https://gtmetrix.com/
What I like about GtMetrix is it uses Yahoo’s score rating system for your website also Google’s. Both are free to use, I recommend testing your website your too see how fast it loads. It should be loading around 4 to 10 seconds. Anything longer then that then their is something wrong, remember for mobile devices their connections are even slower so by you looking after your website & helping load faster helps minimise your bounce rates plus Google will rank you higher.
If you are finding out in the tests that your images are taking long to load. A professional will resize the images to the right dimensions according to the display area of the image on the webpage and optimise better then photoshop.
