Impatience; we all hate a long wait – whether in traffic, on phone or even online. No one would like to frustrate their website visitors because their site is too slow. Slow websites make your business suffer. Ideally, the better the site speed, the better the visitor retention and conversion rate. Up to 40% of visitors will abandon a site if it takes more than 3 secords to load.

How can you check your site speed?
There is one common misconception that goes around. Many people think that if a site isn’t slow on your computer, it isn’t slow. Well, that may be wrong. You see, you do access your site several times on your computer. Thus, your browser caches the site pages and loads them from cache instead of fetching from the server. As such, wherever you are accessing your site from your computer, you are not really accessing it as a normal visitor would. Thus the speed statistics you receive on your computer are not entirely truthful.

The best way to monitor your site’s speed is to use a third party monitoring tool such as Pingdom. These access your site from different geographical areas and compile the results for you to give a more accurate measure of your site’s speed

What slows down your site?
The main causes of slow websites are:
• Page size – heavy webpages, those with images and videos that aren’t optimised, cause slow loading of the website
• Bad plug ins – wordpress plug ins that have been poorly coded can cause page lag
• External scripts – If your page loads too many external scripts such as Ads, it’ll be slow
• Web hosting – a server that has not been well configured or is overloaded with users will cause delay in loading of pages
So, how do you speed up your site?
• Get the right hosting. First, if you are in shared hosting, make sure your hosting provider has a good reputation with regards to uptime and server speed. Choose the best of these. Second, you’ll need to decide which is better for your website: shared hosting or dedicated hosting via a VPS or Dedicated server. There’s a limit with the load speeds for shared hosting. Many people share the same server so, speed will definitely be fast only to a certain point. However, for some critical websites, you’ll need to have a VPS or Dedicated server provisioned for you. Have a look at how to choose whetehr you need a VPS or Shared hosting here
• Host videos externally. External video hosts such as Youtube, ease the burden in your server as they host videos on their servers. They also have better bandwidth offers.
• Perform a wordpress database clean up. WordPress sites are database driven sites. They use MySQL databases. Normally, databases become bloated with unnecessary data as time goes by. These need to be removed regularly – things like spam comments, blog post revisions, and deleted files. To perform this clean up, you can use a plugin such as WP-Optimize
• Use WordPress caching plug in. Instead of having a page generated every time a visitor visits your site, you can use caching plugins to save pages, which then allow subsequent visitors to load pages from cache. This greatly increases site’s loading speeds. Examples of these caching plug ins are WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache
• Optimise images. Images give life to website pages, but if they will cause the page to load super slowly, they have no use being there. So how do you benefit from images for your webpages as you also get rid of their disadvantage? The solution is to Optimize your media. Resize and compress all your images to ensure they are just enough for your site to load fast. You can also make use of plug ins such as Smushit to Optimize your images – it reduces your image by upto 5x
• Update wordpress. Developers work tirelessly to make sure wordpress runs safer and faster. When a new version is released, update your site. You’ll reap the benefits