How to Ensure Fast Loading Times on Your Website

The speed of your WordPress website makes a huge difference to how well it ranks on Google searches. If your site doesn’t have fast loading the bounce rate goes up, and your SEO score goes down. Nearly half of all visitors expect web pages to load in under two seconds.

Around 40 percent of visitors bounce off of your website if the page takes over three seconds to load.

If you want a successful website, you better learn how to fix slow loading pages. You can speed up your website if you minimize its resource usage and consolidate the active data files. This article provides the key steps to ensure fast loading on your website.

Why Your Website Loads Slowly

Slow loading on your website can be caused by a wide range of problems. The good news is that you can fix most of them with the exception of your hosting service. If the problem is on your website hosts end, consider choosing a better web host.

Web Host Problem

Your web hosting service is responsible for responding to the requests for your site data. These requests come in from a viewer’s computer or mobile device.

If a host cannot support the volume of viewership traffic to your site, you will have problems with fast loading. So, if your website data is too big for a shared server host, check out cloud hosting.

WP Configuration Problems

Websites that are incorrectly configured by the admin will have loading issues. Media content can overload a requesting server if the content is not properly cached.

Page and Element Size

If you use a CMS, like WordPress or Wix, it is easy to make the pages of your site too large by mistake. If your pages or elements are sized too large for the smallest viewing device, your site will experience slower loading. Make sure your site pages are of the proper size for viewing on a mobile smartphone.

Unneeded Plugins

Poorly coded or designed plugins can also have a slowing effect on your website. With every new plugin or extension the overall weight of your site data increases. When plugins are inactive they can still contribute to speed degradation.

External Script Overload

WordPress sites can get overloaded by third-party advertisements and redirections. For WordPress sites, many of the front loaders are external and hinder your fast loading metric.

How to Ensure Your Websites Fast Loading Times

Some of the following fixes are one-time solutions, but most are ongoing practices. A fast website takes diligence and attention to keep in prime operating condition. Since over 30 percent of websites on the internet are WordPress websites, a few of the solutions involve a WordPress plugin.

Follow these steps to ensure the fast loading time of your website:

1. Install a Caching Plugin

When a user requests access to your website data goes out from the nearest server location holding the content. If your website has any media content (text, images, video, etc.) it loads slower the further it is from your websites origin server.

Web data travels, from its origin server to the request location. A caching plugin ensures that this process is fast.

A caching plugin copies your websites content files onto a server network. It makes stripped-down HTML script of your posts, videos, and any other content. The static HTML script is lightweight and fast loading.

2. Resize Images

Sizing your images is a little more complicated than it seems. The weight of an image is measured in pixels – not inches, or centimetres. Therefore, your DPI (Dots per Inch) and PPI (Pixels per Inch) image metrics, are irrelevant to the weight of an image.

Every monitor or viewing platform could have a different sized screen, which does not determine the stress put on a CPU or host server. Always download the largest image size possible. High-quality images enable you to resize without quality degradation.

Prior to uploading your images onto your website, optimize them. An image editing software program, like Photoshop, is perfect. Website requests load faster with images that are in PNG or JPEG format.

Compressing the size of your JPEG and PNG files will ensure the optimal performance and fast loading of your website.

3. Turn Lengthy Posts into Multi-Page Posts

Long blog posts can slow down the speed of your site. This is easily fixed if you split up your long posts into multiple pages.

Split up your post into multiple pages in the Blog post text editor. From your backend admin dashboard, go to your blog page.

Type in the tag, “” , and your post automatically splits.

4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN delivers content to your viewers from servers that are nearby the request. The closer the server is to a request, the faster the request is processed. A CDN exists to ensure fast loading of the content of your website.

5. Embed Videos – Do Not Upload

Video media can slow your site down to a crawl. It all depends on where the video content is hosted. If you upload your videos directly to your website, you are self-hosting your video media.

Do not self-host your video media. The server space and resources necessary to handle video content is more than your website can take.

Instead of uploading video content to your website, embed the video from YouTube, Vimeo, or other web video host. Visitors can still view the video from the player on your site, but the data is hosted somewhere else.

6. Keep Your Website Up to Date

Make sure that you pay attention to plugin updates and software updates to your CMS. Any time that you are using a plugin, theme, or operating system that is outdated you will encounter speed issues.

Final Thoughts

The secret to ensuring fast loading times on your website is to keep on top of things and be aware of changes. If you go through the 6 tips above and still encounter problems, it might be time to call your website host.

If this article helped ensure fast loading on your website, share it with others on social media. And visit the blog for the most recent posts on web hosting services. Thanks for reading!