Website speed is a major ranking factor when it comes to search engine rankings. Slow website which take a long time to load will have a much lower chance of reaching the first page of Google, no matter how good their content is. WordPress websites created by amateur web designers are often very slow, which means that they simply don’t get the visitor numbers they deserve. Fortunately, there are a whole lot of things that you, the website owner, can do to speed up your site and improve your search engine rankings. These include:
- Measure Your Website’s Speed
Measuring your site’s speed is an absolute must before you do any of the following things. There are a whole lot of free tools out there to use, many of which will tell you what to improve to make your site faster. Use these suggestions as a starting point for decreasing your page load time.
- Use A Caching Plugin
Although WordPress is a pretty decent platform to build your website on, it does have it’s issues when it comes to page load speeds. Basically, every time someone loads a page on your site, the WordPress platform has to find the required info, put it together into a cohesive page, and transmit it to your viewer. This can cause problems when you have a lot of people visiting your page.
A caching plugin reduces these problems by storing a copy of the page after the first time it is loaded. This means that it is instantly available to every subsequent user, dramatically reducing page load times.
