Is it still necessary to be a computer expert to get a website to load fast and without errors? Can anyone reduce the size of their website and increase the loading speed without reducing the quality of our project? Is it really worth investing in optimizing our website or will you not tell the difference?
The optimization of a web page basically consists of making it load as fast as possible and that the navigation is technically light but satisfactory.
Users from all over the world connect to the internet every day to find an answer to their concerns. However, not all have state-of-the-art devices or high-speed internet connections that allow them to navigate quickly, so it is crucial not only that our website is as light as possible so that it is downloaded quickly in the browser of our users, but also have a support that guarantees our users a smooth experience and free of errors and failures.
Many people think that to optimize the speed of our website it is necessary to have advanced knowledge that allows us to make certain changes. I will not lie to you: this is so. If you want a complete optimization of your site, you will inevitably have to put your feet in the mud.
However, before getting to such a deep level of specialization, there are a few tricks that anyone can pull off to substantially optimize the size and loading speed of any web page.
Why should I start optimizing my website as soon as possible?
Bypassing your website optimization is like ditching your car at a red light.
It is not about creating a web page all at once and leaving it to its own devices because you consider that you have already done everything you had to do.
Many people postpone the optimization task ad eternum thinking that given the technical difficulty involved, it is not worth trying so hard to achieve negligible changes.
The big mistake is to think that a few thousandths of a second are nothing. However, you should know that when loading a website, miniseconds are valued as gold.
Think of it this way: your website is neither more nor less than a block of files like those that can be inside a folder on your hard drive, with the difference that they are hosted on a distant server.
What happens is that, every time someone enters your page from a browser, all those files are transferred from a server to the browser that displays them on the screen. Keeping the number of files and their size as small as possible so that it loads as soon as possible is the goal of any website optimization.
Today, there are various and effective ways of easy implementation that will make the download of your web page almost instantaneous. And it's not as difficult as you think at all.
With a few modifications you can make your website the fastest on the entire network.
What you will achieve if you optimize your website:
- Better experience for users: Users will visit us more times, for longer, and will go through more pages of our site. An improved load will make our users happier, so that we will increase the chances that their journey through our website will be longer and more satisfactory.
- We will improve our position in search engines: We all know that the loading speed of a web page directly influences the position we occupy in a search engine like Google. By reducing the loading time and compressing some files, we will be able to appear higher when users do a search.
What to do to get my website to load as fast as light?
Well, this is not an easy question to answer, as it will depend on the individual questions of each website.
Luckily, there are some practices that most of us can do to get our sites to load much faster.
The focus is clear. If our web page are simply files that move, logic tells us that for these to be delivered before we must:
- Reduce the number of resources
- Reduce the size of resources
It is not about computer juggling, but about applying the premise that always works in life: to simplify is to maximize.
Here are some things you can do to optimize your website without this becoming a tedious nightmare.
1. Select an optimized template
A good template should not only be beautiful, but functional, light and up-to-date.
On the internet we find countless free themes that allow us to give one or another aspect to our website in WordPress. However, very few are able to offer a solid and reliable result during user browsing.
The best thing for these cases is to have a payment template, like the ones we find in ThemeForest, where we can even try a demo version from the page itself. Remember that if something costs money, it is probably better too, so think that with a good template you will attract more users, which means an increase in your income.
Take a few moments to find a template that has good ratings, that has a compatible design and that is as light as possible but, above all, that fits with the line of your project.
It is also important to be aware that templates include many functionalities, but activating them all not only often makes no sense for our purposes, but this will obviously also significantly affect the loading time of your website.
2. Hire your services in quality accommodation
This many times can no longer be changed, so maybe it can be used for future projects.
Good quality hosting not only reduces the risk of our website being slow or temporarily inaccessible, but it also guarantees us good assistance in the event of an incident.
Remember that you don't always need the most expensive plan. Just make sure yours is a perfect fit for your project and that the services they offer are worth the price you pay.
Without a doubt, my favorite company to hire a hosting is Namecheap. I already explained the reasons why I consider them the best hosting provider on the internet, so if you want to know more about domains and hosting I recommend that you read this Article.
3. Install a plugin to manage the cache
For WordPress there are countless plugins that help us manage the cached version of our sites.
There are some very well known, such as WP SuperCache or W3 Total Cache, which manage to compress and optimize our website to offer it to users more quickly.
These plugins compress, minify, move or block different resources on your web page to guarantee the most instantaneous loading possible.
4. Uninstall and delete all the plugins that you are not using
Another of the big mistakes that many people who use WordPress make.
To increase the loading speed it is not only important to deactivate all those that you do not use, but also, eliminating all those plugins that we do not use will have a positive impact on our optimization.
Take a look at your website and really consider which plugins are worthwhile and which ones are useless.
5. Install the updates
Keeping your website up-to-date not only helps you in terms of security and features, but also in terms of speed.
Developers and programmers around the world go to great lengths not only to cover security holes and implement new features, but also put a lot of effort in making their software offer an ever-better experience for those who use it.
You can check for updates for your website on a weekly basis, so you only have to run the installer for a single day.
6. Optimize images
I have noticed that many sites on the Internet use uncompressed images to offer the highest possible quality without realizing that the large size of the images slows down the loading in the browser.
It is not necessary to fill your site with large HD photos to make your visitors fall in love. Good quality images, but also the right dimensions and weight, will make the biggest difference between a site with the best and the worst possible optimization.
Although there is some software for Windows, such as Cesium, which allows to reduce the quality and crop the images to minimize their size, we can also find some free plugins for WordPress.
The most popular are EWWW Image Optimizer or WP Smush, with which we will be able to optimize all the images that we have on our website automatically in a few minutes.
7. Activate AMP for mobile technology
AMP is an open source project whose objective is the development of web versions optimized exclusively for mobile devices.
These types of pages have nothing to do with the responsive design that was talked about so much a few years ago as the supposed future web standard.
However, the deep penetration of navigation from smartphones and tablets has led to the development of its own version for these devices. The AMP project aims to reduce loading time as much as possible, offering only the content that the user demands almost instantaneously.
Its implementation can be a bit chaotic if you do not know programming, luckily, the best WordPress templates are already incorporating options that allow the possibility of enabling the AMP version with a single click.
In any case, you should not worry, because in the coming months mechanisms will appear that will allow you to configure AMP on your website almost automatically.
The reality seems clear: the advantages of a web page that loads correctly as fast as possible will not only increase its technical performance, but a lightweight site will also make users a little happier. And best of all, now you too can put these recommendations into practice that will surely give your project a good boost.
