How to Increase Website Page Load Speed in WordPress
If you have ever come forward to a website that took forever to load, you know what a pain it is. The website might contain a piece of information that is extremely valuable, however, at some point, you would get exhausted and leave. The same goes for most of the users. You have less than 15 minutes to capture the attention of those who shoes you, and what a waste it would be to waste that seconds on loading.
Now let's see what are the main reasons for ending up with slow-loading websites. It can be unclean code, bad hosting, too many Ads, and Unoptimised Images.
- Unclean Code: When searching for information, we love when the website operates well, and it never crosses our minds what it takes. One of what it takes is a clean code. The code is important as it lays the foundation of your website. To have a website with clean code means to do updates much easier, be secure and stop worrying about possible breaks, and lastly but most importantly your website will run faster.
- Bad Hosting: When it comes to hosting, you might not want to choose the cheap way. Bad hosting will not only impact your website speed, but you will most probably come forward to ranking problems. The reason is that search engineers mostly penalize and drop the ranking of the websites which use poor and insecure hosting. This is why it's important to research and opt for the best WordPress hosting. Not choosing a hosting is not an option, because you could wake up one day having nothing, the only option is to follow the market leaders for example Bluehost.com. Make sure you are using a reliable WordPress web hosting provider for your business. Additionally, consider reliable providers offering DaaS (Desktop-as-a-Service) solutions to ensure a robust and secure hosting environment.
- An extensive number of Ads: Ads take much more time to load, and sometimes more time than it takes to do the actual content. Another thing about Ads is that if you cross the line, you might say "adios" to your organic search data. On the other hand, Ads are probably the quickest way to earn money, but search engines capture those who choose the easy path of success and put harsh penalties by leaving a big fat mark on your SEO and ranking.
- Unoptimized Images: Some of the mentioned problems take a lot of time and resources to improve, but it's not about optimizing images.
How Can Unoptimised Images Impact Your Website?
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- Page Load: Images mostly take all the force and resources to load your website. The browsers give the importance to loading images first relevant to their content, both on mobile and PC
- SEO: There is a special toolkit called Image SEO, which includes image optimization. Search engines give a special pass to the content which is user-friendly and visualized. It is better for your website SEO to include well quality original pictures to explain something than to write another 2000 words to do so.
Why Do Images Load Slowly? Unresponsive Image size
What Does this mean?
Some of the images you load on your website in full size might be too heavy. So always reduce the image size before uploading them. The resolution to these can be Image optimization tools. Let's look through 3 of them.
1. Smush
One of the main things to pay attention to when it comes to Image Optimiser is to find the one, which will mercilessly sweep the unnecessary Image data and still serve quality. Smush does its job accountable and the proof is 1+ million active installations on WordPress.org.
Let's see what else Smush offers besides compressing the images:
- Lazy-load feature: With this feature, you can detect offscreen images, and convert them into next-gen formats (e.g. WebP). Also deferring offscreen images will let your server concentrate on other elements on your website. This is especially helpful for websites that have many pages with various pictures displayed on them.
- Bulk Smush: Once you install Smush, most of the pictures on your website will be on its radars. This feature immediately goes over all your website images and finds the ones that need some compressing. And the "bulk" stands for you being able to optimize those pictures all at once.
- Automatic Compression: Smush is designed to save your time as well, meaning that after Installing Smush, it will automatically optimize the uploaded pictures.
- Double Compression: Every image contains some type of data about the image, so-called image history: source, author name, metadata, etc. And if you are mostly concentrated on the speed of your website, you can erase the unnecessary image data with Super Smush and imply additional compression.
- Image Resizing: WordPress automatically scales the images that are larger than 2560px in height and weight. And here comes the unnecessary large oversize pictures, which you can easily fix with Smush Image Resizer. The plugin will resize the uploaded full-size images to your own maximum size, with just one click.
- Converter: It's quite impressive to get a whole package under the name of an Image Optimizer. Smush doesn't stop and offers PNGs to the JPEG converter if it reflects on your file size.
Utilize Smush CDN
What is a CDN?
CDN opens as a "Content Delivery Network". It is responsible for geographically distributing groups of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. Basically the closer you are to the server the better website performance you get.
How Does Smush CDN work?
Smush CDN resizes your files and converts them to a next-gen format (WebP) delivering them to your visitors from its multi-location servers. Simple as that!
Some of these functions are featured in the Smush Premium. So check that out as well.
2. Converter for Media
This Plugin is a total on-point tool when it comes to image compression. No technical experience is needed to figure out how it works, all you need on your plate is the basic knowledge of installing a WordPress plugin.
Converter for Media is:
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- Self-Running Plugin: with this saying, one of the assets is that Converter for Media requires one click to the job for the rest of your life. After that, the plugin always checks on your website image circulation and does the job.
- Super Light: The creators made sure to not include any unnecessary elements and codes that would reduce the effectiveness of the plugin or make it uneasy to use.
- AVIF format Images: you have already heard of WebP image formatting which helps you to serve the images in a smaller size and better quality. So AVIF is the latest image codec on earth. Converter for Media is primarily successful for having AVIF extension, which allows basically the highest level of image compression.
- Choosing Image Formats: When the browser tries to download an image file, the server checks if it supports the AVIF format (if enabled in the plugin settings). If so, the browser will receive an equivalent of the original image in AVIF format. In case it does not support AVIF but supports the WebP format, the browser will receive an equivalent of the original image in WebP format. If the browser does not support either WebP or AVIF, the original image is loaded. This means full support for all browsers.
- Remote Server: Converting images is a server-intensive process, especially for shared hosting. Using this method, our server converts your images and your server is not overloaded. When converting remotely, you do not need to worry about servers not supporting WebP conversion.
I have mentioned the strongest sides of this plugin when it comes to features. And what about the customer approach?
Their Support is at a high level, it is customer-centric, fast, and on point. No going about and around any issue, you have a problem concerning the plugin? WebP offers the solution right away. Another thing is their sensational increase in active installs per week. It is another proof that Converter for Media is constantly bringing and keeping trust among its customers.
Here are the file formats that Converter for Media
supports:
- JPEG Support
- PNG Support
- GIF Support
- WebP Support
- AVIF Support
Keep In mind that some of the features the plugin offers are included in the Pro Version of Converter for Media.
Converter for Media has an amazing offer for our users the first 100 people, who are interested in getting the Pro Version of Converter for Media plugin, will get a 10% discount on the purchase by using the coupon code AYSPRO10, this applies to all plans so hurry up and grab the deal!
3. WP Compress
"LOAD FASTER, RANK HIGHER & CONVERT BETTER ON AUTOPILOT" is the base of their work. It is super user-friendly because all you need to do is to link your website to the plugin.
With WP Compress you get:
- Fully Managed Solutions. You can get used not only to compressing individual websites but also get other industry-leading agency features such as:
- Monthly Client Quotas
- Centralized Management Portal
- Detailed Client Reporting
- Remote Configuration & Optimization
- Bulk Website Linking
- Local and Live Optimisation mode.
Let's see what is a Local Optimisation: The common compression of your files is local optimization, it gives you the opportunity to not only compress all the media in your website but also generate other image formats such as WebP.
What is a Live Optimisation: Live optimization is a next-gen solution to image compression, It compresses and serves the image to its best quality every time someone enters the website.
The real-time compressions are paired with:
- Adaptive Images (by device)
- Next-Gen WebP images
- Retina Device Support
- Image Lazy Loading
However, WP Compress is especially attentive to its users' security and it backs up all your original images so that you won't lose anything. Besides security, it can also save a lot of space with cloud backups. And last but not least, with WP Compress you can get the best support via live chat and automatic ticket conversion.
4. TinyImage
This image compression tool is among the easiest ones out there to use. All you have to do is drag and drop the images onto the tool and it’ll start compressing them right away.
Here’s what TinyImage has to offer for image compression:
- Bulk compression: With TinyImage, you can compress up to 10 images of 20 MB each at a time. This enables you to compress images at scale.
- Security: During the compression, all your images are secured by 256 bit encryption. This ensures that they remain safe throughout.
- Installation-free: You don’t have to install TinyImage anywhere to use it. All you have to do is head to the website in your browser and get started.
- Instant compression: The compression algorithm used by TinyImage ensures that your images are compressed within seconds.
- Completely free: For using TinyImage you don't need to pay any fees. Only the bulk and unlimited plans cost money.
- Loss-free compression: TinyImage the quality of the images doesn't change while compressing them with TinyImage.
Here are file formats supported by TinyImage:
- JPG
- JPEG
- PNG
TinyImage is especially focused on image security so all your files are protected with 256 bit encryption and are deleted soon after they’re compressed.
Are you looking for a suitable WordPress theme for your website? Read this Blocksy theme review to know if it is the right theme for you.
To wrap up: While many would think that image size and its data don't make much difference, we understood throughout this article that it does. Image optimization is an inseparable part of optimizing your website, reducing page load, and increasing conversion. At most there are many other issues that could interfere with user experience, however, image compression and optimization is a matter that you can always take into your own hands.
And of course, do not miss the chance to go through our step-by-step "how-to" video tutorials on our YouTube channel. Do not forget to follow our Facebook and Twitter pages, to be informed about all the new product updates and plugins.
