If you have a website or website with a WordPress open code base, it is seen that the speed of the site decreases when the number of visitors to your site increases, and visitors leave your site because your site will open longer than expected.
The main reasons are the software architecture PHP used in the infrastructure of WordPress, the excessive amount of operations performed in the background during any query, the fact that the WordPress theme you are using does not have a clean design, the size of the images you add to your site is large, which causes the site to slow down.
Why Site Speed Matters:
I am sure many of you would agree with me if I say that one of the situations that we cannot bear to wait during the day and that annoys us the most is a slow opening website.
When a subject is researched on the internet, we take a look at the sites we come across, and when we log in to the site, we look at the opening speed of the page. If it is a site that takes a long time to open, it will cause us to close that site immediately and consider other options.
As a result of a study , it was revealed that 47% of users expect a web page to open in under 2 seconds. When the time is longer, 75% of them stated that they switch to the page of the other website instead of waiting for the website.
It gives great importance to the site speed of the search engines. As of 2010, Google has added site speed to the Google algorithm for websites to rank higher. The faster the pages on the website, the higher the probability of ranking in search engines, especially Google.
As a result of the fast loading of the pages on the website, search engine bots (for example: GoogleBot) will be able to navigate the site more easily, visit more of the pages on the site and ensure that the site is indexed faster.
Testing Site Speed:
There are various methods of controlling the site speed of sites built with WordPress infrastructure or sites built with other website infrastructure. Here is the list of the most important site speed control tools for you to easily check the speed of your website or any website.
Google PageSpeed Test
It is a site speed control tool prepared by Google. By clicking this link, enter the site address or page address you want to test in the window that opens, then click the “Analyze” button. After the test process is over, it brings us mobile and desktop speed rates. There are steps to increase mobile and desktop speed. By following these steps, you can maximize the site speed.
GTMetrix
It provides you with more detailed reports than the Google PageSpeed Test tool. You can test the site speed by clicking this link . Web designers generally prefer GTMetrix. As a result of site analysis, it offers you reporting by rating the site you are testing.
The report includes your average page speed score, YSlow (YSlow: website analysis and scoring tool.) score, page load speed, page size. According to the rating in the report, what needs to be corrected is included. You can increase site speed by making corrections.
Server Info
Google also rates the site speed by looking at the server response time. It is useful to start by testing the server service you will receive from any Hosting company. The Google server counts the response time as very good if it takes less than one second, medium if it is between two and four seconds, and slows the site if it is more than four seconds. Therefore, when you buy hosting, it is also in phase to test the server response time. You can test the server response time by clicking this link .
Actions to Increase WordPress Site Speed
Optimizing Pictures:
We need to take care that the size of the images we upload to our site is under 100 KB. While saving the pictures we edited in Photoshop, we need to save the picture size in accordance with the Web format. You can easily save images in Photoshop web format for Mac: Alt+Shift+Cmd+S For Windows: Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S key combination.
Plugins have been developed to make it easier for us to optimize images in the WordPress infrastructure. The most used image size compression plugins are EWWW Image Optimizer , WP Smushit , ShortPixel Image Optimizer . By installing any of these plugins, you can easily reduce the size of the images on your site.
Optimizing the Database:
Every transaction we make in the WordPress admin panel of the plugins we install, the pages we create and the articles are recorded in the Database. Database size increases after each transaction. Especially when we preview the pages and articles we have created, all of them are recorded in the Database, no matter how many times we preview them.
Most importantly, when we add and remove plug-ins, remnants remain in the Database and the queries made in the Database increase, and the increase in queries slows down the speed of the site. WP Optimize with 500,000+ active installations to delete and optimize database remnants is .
After installing this plugin, all we have to do is click on the WP optimizer plugin in the left menu of the admin panel and click on the “Run all selected optimizations now” button on the page that appears. The plugin performs the necessary operations, deletes the residuals in the Database and optimizes it.
Increasing Speed with Cache Plugins:
In order to increase the site speed, the site speed can be increased by installing the Cache plugin and compressing the CSS and Javascripts in the WordPress infrastructure and the theme we use. You can increase your site speed by installing one of the most used Cache plugins.
- WP Rocket : +1,739,000 Websites in Orbit
- WP Super Cache: 1+ million downloads and active usage
- WP Fastest Cache: 200,000+ active uses
- W3 Total Cache: It has more than 1+ million downloads and active usage.
