The Need for Site Speed Part2

Make Your WordPress Website Load Faster!

Site load time is an important component to your overall success. Even if you discount the SEO, and ranking benefits a faster loading site will improve the user experience. Happy visitors make for happy buyers, which is what we are all striving for. Conversions!

Hey Y'all,

I trust everything is going well for you in cyber land today. If you had a chance to check your site load speed and are a bit dismayed not to worry. Today we will start looking at ways to improve that.

Some of this information will be old hat for you seasoned pros out there but there a many new members following this post that will benefit form the information.

Let's start reducing the number of eye blinks it takes your site to load

Images

We all know images improve the appearance of our sites. They also help us sell our products. But images can also slow a site down. There are steps we can take to help with this.

Compress your images before uploading them into your media library. Image compression is different from image resizing or cropping. Image compression shrinks the pixels resulting in the same image but a smaller file size. Let's look at this WA banner.

Image compression cut the file size by more than half with no difference in appearance. Let's see what it does for load time.

I created 2 posts they both have the same text, the same banner image, they both link to the same WA signup page.

The first post was created using the HTML code for the banner that you can find by clicking on the plane in the top tool bar. Here is the load speed result.

As you can see the load time is 802ms.

This second page has the exact same text and image but was created differently. I grabbed the banner image only compressed the image and uploaded it to the media library. I then added the image to the post grabbed my affiliate link and added it to the image. Same look same result when the image is clicked on. Let' see if we cut down load time.

This test was ran from the same server about thirty second apart. We went form 802ms to load the page to 433ms just by doing things a bit different.

With that page alone we cut 369ms off of load time. Granted this is a simple page but the numbers tell the story. And this is just 1 banner! You do the math.

Here are a few images compression site that are free to use. There are several more if you Google the term. I use the tinypng myself.

tinypng.com

compresspng.com

Try not to load a boat load of images to your media library for use some day. They add weight to your site and slows it down. Upload images as needed. Please do not upload an image until after compression! If you don't have the storage space on your hard drive use cloud storage there are many free clouds out there.

Also save yourself some time after you compress your change the title. You already know your keyword work it into the tile of the image in the correct format. best-inflatable- pool-float.jpg. You are then one step ahead.

If you already have a boat load of images already loaded on your site don't despair. The EWWW Image Optimizer is the plugin for you . It will compress all the images you already have in place. But if you only have a few i would would redo them and save a plugin.

ewww-image-optimizer...

Today we cut over 300ms off load time. How much more can we cut?

Did you know that WordPress 4.2 brought along emojis support? It runs whether you use emojis or not. Tomorrow we will get rid of that and a few more load time cutting tricks. So be sure to check out Need for Site Speed Part3

Why is vanilla ice cream white when vanilla extract is brown?

Until next time,