The sites I build or use are optimised to be fast and accessible. I minify scripts and styles, remove unnecessary bulk, making your sites load faster, and rank higher in Google.
The speed of your website is crucial to your success.
Load your website in under a second!
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Why is it very important to optimise site speed?
A website that is slow or not optimised is bad for everyone. People get impatient and upset when they have to wait for a website to load that takes a long time. This slow speed either makes a bad impact or none at all, since the user has already left and forgotten about your website, which means you lose sales.
Your site’s speed affects many things, such as how easy it is for visitors to use, its SEO, and its conversion rate. No matter how small, I think every website should do something to make it load faster.
On the plus side, a faster website is better for SEO. This means that your website will show up higher in Google’s search results, which will bring more people to your Melbourne business. Still, I have one question: how slow is your site?
What is Site Speed or Page Speed?
Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your page loads.
Want to test your website speed? Visit https://gtmetrix.com/ and test your page/site speed.
Checkout GT Metrix Report for post on this site that includes several images and a slider – but still loads in under half a second (363 milliseconds).
As illustrated below, have a look at Google page speed test for one of my posts that also loads in less than half a second on Desktops and in just a second on Mobiles!
As illustrated below, also have a look at page speed test for Leader Workshops, a client whose loads in less than a second!
Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used to rank pages. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation.
Nobody likes a slow website!
Page speed is also important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Longer load times have also been shown to negatively affect conversions. The post Evaluating page experience for a better web (on the Google Web Master Central Blog) highlighted that Google measures how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page.
How do I improve your page speed?
Here are some of the many ways I can increase your page or site speed:
- Enable compression to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files.
- By optimising your code (by removing spaces, commas, code comments, formatting, and unused code).
- Avoid redirects
- Leverage browser caching
- Optimise images – ensure images are no larger than they need to be, that they are in the right file format and compressed for the web.
- Use pure css buttons and icon fonts (which means fewer HTTP requests) rather than images .
- Reduce unnecessary plugins.
- Get rid of page features that aren’t needed and don’t add much value to the user experience – for example sliders, tabs.
Why does my site load slowly?
There’s always a reason why your site is slow. Sometimes all of your problems are caused by one big problem, but most of the time they’re caused by a bunch of small problems that haven’t been dealt properly.
Your cheap but slow web host
You get what you pay for when it comes to hosting. Don’t be tempted by cheaper hosting choices for the website of your Melbourne business. There’s a reason why Godaddy and NameCheap are so cheap: they use shared hosting. Your site will load more slowly if you use shared hosting because it will be thrown in with thousands of other sites that are all fighting for server requests, resources, and memory. If you want your website to load as quickly as possible, you need dedicated hosting. This is because dedicated WordPress Cloud hosting means that your site is running on a server that is only used for YOUR site.
Too Many Add-Ons or Plugins for WordPress
People are very happy when they get their website. They are so excited about it that they add a bunch of extra features to it using something called a plugin. This is very likely to happen with WordPress sites that load slowly since it is so simple to do. It’s important to me that I don’t add plugins when I make websites for our clients. I always try to keep them as low as possible to make the site faster and easier to work on and keep up to date. For example, this client had several slider plugins (one for videos another for Google Reviews), which was causing not only causing the entire site to load slowly but also causing page to load wierldy. These are the kinds of mistakes that can slow down your website very quickly.
Poorly built WordPress themes
A lot of WordPress themes are built with a lot of features, which can slow down the site. It costs more to use these huge themes because they make the website more complicated, which slows it down even before you change settings. It is very important for someone like me who cares a lot about speed to choose a fast theme.
GeneratePress is my go to theme for all of my own and client WordPress projects. At just 7.5KB, it is the perfect lightweight theme for your next project with over 5.5 million downloads, 1000+ 5 star reviews, and more than 100,000 happy customers. Learn about GeneratePress – The perfect lightweight theme for your next project.
How much does it cost optimise my website speed?
It usually takes me between 1 to 3 hours to speed up a website. It could take longer based on how many pages the website has and how complicated it is.
My hourly rate is $125.
Once your site has been speed optimised, I can give you additional tips on how to make it even faster!
Learn more about website speed optimisation
Some recent articles on the topic of page speed optimisation.
WordPress Modal using GenerateBlocks
Build a fast loading WordPress modal popup using GenerateBlocks Container and Button blocks. The modal is easy to edit, responsive, accessible and visually appealing. You can set one up in just 5 mins!
GeneratePress Mega Menu – WordPress Mega Menu without bloat
Build an amazing WordPress mega menu using GeneratePress Elements and GenerateBlocks Tabs. The mega menu will be easy to edit, responsive, accessible and visually appealing. You can set one up in just 5 mins!
GenerateBlocks Slider – Lightweight and Accessible
Most slider plugins on WordPress are an overkill and slow down your site. Let’s implement a light-weight and accessible slider using GenerateBlocks. You can set one up in just 10 mins!
Koko Analytics – privacy friendly WordPress analytics
Effective SEO relies heavily on accurate metrics. Koko Analytics helps you track your visitors’ behaviour and gain insights into your website’s performance.
Cloudways – Ultimate Managed Cloud Hosting Platform
Cloudways provides all the tools to manage your WordPress site. You can choose AWS, Google, Vultr, Linode, or DO to host your site or shop.
Video Backgrounds for WordPress Page or Post using GeneratePress
A video background is an appealing design aesthetic and a great way to showcase your services, facilities or skills. Adding a background video to our Page or Post Hero is super easy. Using GeneratePress Elements, we just need to upload the video to media library and add some HTML and CSS into the content area.
Blazing fast community site hosted for free – FTAA
Fast loading community website (under 2 seconds) for FTAA with no annual hosting fees or domain charges. Add/Edit pages using simple WYSIWYG editor.
Does the WordPress Block Editor (Gutenberg) slow down my site?
I did some tests to see if the new block editor (Gutenberg) slow down my site. I noticed less than half-a-second difference in page speed between the classic and block editors. For this minute difference, you gain a lot of control over layout and design of your page/post content. You are more likely to slow down your site if you add unnecessary plugins to add features that you may hardly use or need.
SiteGround – Affordable and Quality Web Hosting
All our client sites including this one are hosted on SiteGround. I use SiteGround because they offers excellent uptime, customer service and strong security.
