Website Speed Warning!
So here I was all eager and full of passion and simply could not wait to churn out one article after the other, but what I did not consider at this early stage of the game was my site speed, especiallly when tested on mobile.
To my shock I discovered the site speed of one of my websites is only 15% on mobile and one of the big reasons is that my images are not optimised. So not only should you consider as you building your website what it looks like on mobile, but as you go along you should also check your site speed to avoid the complications I am now experiencing.
To be very honest with you it really was a big blow to me and I did go a bit into sulk mode because I worked so hard to make sure my site looks good on computer and mobile that I found it difficult to swallow that there are now loads of things that I need to go fix and optimise before I can continue creating content.
The biggest issue for me is that I am not that technical, so when it comes to these kind of optimisations regarding site speed I do feel I am sometimes a little bit out of my depth. I do hope that optimising my images would in general fix my site speed issues as some of the more technical issues and computer jargon I do not always understand that well and I might as a result struggle to address these issues.
There is a WP pluging you can install that will automatically optimise your images, but unfortunately for some kind of reason it refuses to optimise several of my images and is something I would now have to optimise manually.
Lesson to learn:
Make perfectly sure that you take the time to test your site speed throughout the building process of your website. Make perfectly sure that you optimise each and everyone of your images before using it in your articles, sliders etc. to avoid site speed complications.
Yes, it might take you a little bit longer with this approach, but do believe me that you will thank yourself for taking the time to do so as you will save yourself loads of time and loads of headaches in the long run.
If you are one of those that simply go ahead and create content without ever considering your site speed, then I honestly hope that you are not going to get a surprise like it did lol!
I am hoping to make quick work of this fixing everything now as I am done sulking now lol!
Wishing you all the greatest of success here on WA!
Kind regards
Schalk Zeeman
Recent Comments
29
Hi Schalk,
I'm sorry to hear this happened. I sure hope you can get it all straightened out... I know you will!!
Thank you for the heads up.
Take care and have a wonderful weekend.
Monica
Many thanks for the encouragement! Certainly will! Wishing you all the best of success here on WA!
Thank you and I wish you the same... I wish you much success with your online business Schalk.
Monica
Great post and I hope you get through the problems in a timely manner. How do I make sure that an image is optimised for both desktop and mobile?
I am using ezgif dot com at the moment - it is free and has image optimizer option amongst many other things. I am sure there are many alternatives. The best way to go about it is to make perfectly sure what the dimensions are of the image that needs to fit into a slider for example so there are no scaling issues within WordPress itself. What you do not want e.g. is to upload an image say that is 2400 x 1200 and then you get WordPress to scale that image down to lets say 600 x 400. You want to upload an image that is 600 x 400 from the start as it will take wordPress loading time to scale that image and that compromises your site speed.
I check my site speed via Google as they are the ones that are going to determine your site rank after all and site speed does play a role in SEO ranking. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
If your images are the right size it can be compressed via the software (aka optimised) as the smaller the image file size the quicker it would load which results in a quicker site speed. You do not want to compromise the quality of images too much though so these compression image tools helps you to retain the quality pretty much while actually compressing the file.
I hope this helps.
You do get automatic image optimiser plugins as well and I used imagify but it was not effective in scaling down all my images and I would have to do some manually and as I had so many images all over already I had to pay a one off amount to get most of my images optimised by the plugin. In future though the plugin will optimise any image I upload automatically. The plugin does provide you with a free quantity you can optimise per month, but any more than that and you need to pay.
In my opinion doing it manually is a much better solution and it is free.
Also see the training @Dmonyer posted lower down posted below about lazy loading of images. That can also be helpful, but only after you optimised your images.
Sorry about this blip in the road, Schalk. I'm sure you'll get it fixed and carry on as never before. Good luck. Carol
Hi Schalk, don't think you are sulking, just making a point. Mobile web speeds have always been a pain for me. So many things contribute to slow mobile speeds. The amount of graphics, pictures, plugins and so on. How about your other speeds. I think you are pretty tech knowledgeable and you will be speeding down the mobile highway at full throttle in no time at all.
Thanks so much for the positivity. I think you are right that I know what I should be doing lol, but just been postponing a bit watching Netflix or doing anything else than to fix the issues I have to because it looks like a mammoth task which I did not expect. But I guess once I actually just start doing it and take it by the horns I would realise that it is actually not such a big deal, and like you say will get the speeds right up there in no time. Many thanks for the positivity and inspiring words, as that is what I needed. Many thanks. Wishing you all the best here on WA!
Hi again, I have no doubts in you achieving higher speeds. I do keep an eye out on the members I follow. I know you have what it takes to overcome any road bumps. All the best.
Thanks Schalk, it is hard to pay attention to every detail for us non-techie types, but speed is very important. Having no experience in website building for ranking in the SERPS I have taken the approach to understand it before I undertake it!
Success in getting your speed up and your business!
Cheers ~ Timo
Thank you for the heads up Schalk. This is not something I have considered. I shall check asap as I, like you have an amount of content. Deep breath, it will be fine. thank you.
Let's hope lol. :) And you are welcome. I am sure a lot of people forget to consider this, hence the reason for the reminder.
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I made this mistake at first too but there is a really easy to use and free tool that will massively reduce your images size.
https://compressimage.toolur.com
You should also resize your images as most devices are not going to render your website in 4k (a lot of royalty free images are downloaded in 4 or 5k resolutions).
To do this log in to your website and in word press, click on media and then click on one of your images that you want to resize.
Click edit image and you will see in the top right hand side of your screen the image dimensions in pixels.
The great thing is that you only need to change one of the dimensions and WP will work out the other one for you so that it doesn't stretch the image. Personally I keep my images at a maximum width of 315 pixels for a blog post and 780 pixels for a feature image but it's different for each theme so best to experiment and see what works for you.
Thanks so much for this Mark. I just need to make sure I understand. Clicking on the image in WordPress is simply to check what it is WordPress recommends in terms of image size, right. I then need to use the tool you suggested to compress and resize the image and then re-upload it to WordPress, right? Many thanks. This was very helpful.
Yes upload all of your images to toolur for compression and then re upload them to WordPress. I do this one at a time so that I don't miss any.
You can resize your images on toolur as well but I edit the image size in WordPress.
Don't forget to delete your uncompressed images from WordPress after you have replaced them with compressed versions.