If your WordPress website takes more than a few seconds to load, most visitors will leave—regardless of how good your service is.
They want a fast, reliable site; otherwise, they will switch to a competing site to meet their needs.
As a business owner, this can significantly impact your sales and visibility, ultimately leading to very few or no sales due to a sluggish and unresponsive website.
As a Nigerian retailer, you may be uncertain about how to address this issue. To run a successful website and grow, you need to build reliability and trust and enhance SEO. Additionally, learning marketing strategies will help you engage with people and keep them glued to your website.
Additionally, creating a smooth, effective, and scalable WordPress website is relatively straightforward.
You can see that it is never too late to step up your game. In this content, you will learn the best strategic tools and ways to optimise your website speed.
Strategies for Optimising Your WordPress Website
1. Supportive Hosting Service: As a business owner who is passionate about groth and quality leads, need a reliable and effective hosting that allow users access your website worldwide.
It provides the necessary infrastructure for a website to be accessible. Without a hosting service, your website cannot be reached, and no one will have the chance to learn about your products, let alone make a purchase. It’s like a store that saves all your files; imagine what would happen if it stopped working.
Hosting is built using a combination of coding languages, including HTML and CSS. The most commonly used hosting for WordPress website are Bluehost and Hostinger. They are very reliable, providing comprehensive support and maintenance to ensure your hosting service runs perfectly.
Note. Sometimes, looking for the best hosting service can feel overwhelming to choosing the right one, because different hosting services are meant for various purposes; therefore, you should consider:
- The hosting security
- Speed
- Support
As your business expands, you need to scale up to handle high traffic and prevent negative impacts that can cause damage.
2. Aesthetic Theme: WordPress offers countless eye-catching themes that perfectly match your brand’s identity. You shouldn’t just randomly select any form of theme until you read their review or a trusted expert recommend it.
It’s known that when people visit your website and see a visually appealing theme design, it gives a good impression of your brand’s professionalism. However, randomly selecting a theme could negatively affect your website’s appearance over time.
Among the best free theme to select are Astra, Neve, Kadence, GeneratePress, and Blocksy.
Consider these before picking a theme.
- What are the aims and objectives of your website: to sell, inform, or connect and associate with the community?.
- Performance. Consider whether the theme is perfectly lightweight or heavy, and also the fit for SEO.
- Customization. Does the theme allow easy changes like header font size
- Business model. Are the developers providing support for enhancing the theme’s security and functionality?
- Integration. Can the theme work with other essential plugins your website needs?
3. Frequently Updating: To manage and run your WordPress website professionally, pay close attention to keeping plugins up to date. As a website owner, it’s an integral aspect of running a website. Don’t joke with it.
4. Use updated PHP: Using an outdated PHP version can result in sluggish responses when visitors visit your website. Therefore, check your hosting provider to confirm whether you have the latest version of PHP. Otherwise, request the latest version, which is PHP 8.4.
5. Mobile-friendly: As of the recent update, 96.3%. Since 96.3% of people browse on their phones, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, I doubt it will load fast enough to keep potential customers engaged. Your site must mobile-friendly with swift loading and navigation, regardless of phone size. A responsive website allows visitors to view images without zooming, avoids tiny or oversized buttons, and ensures speedy access. Additionally, it gives visitors that you understand them.
6. Installing Image Compression Plugin: To Reduce Image file size. You may consider installing Smush plugin for your website’s images, having large image take a apge long time to load for visitors. It is one of the reasons your website speed is stuck. The tools helps you compress large files, reducing load times and data consumption. Free Hint: Consider convert all of your image to webp version.
7. Sign up for a Content Delivery Network (CDN): It’s a network server that retailers have across different locations, enabling their websites to load faster. As a WordPress website owner, you should sign up with a CDN provider such as Cloudflare without any technical skills. When a customer visits the website, the CDN delivers content from the nearest server instead of the main hosting server (which might be far away). Which means pages load faster for customers in Nigeria and other countries.
8. Remove Unused Plugins and Themes: Ensure that any installed plugins on your WordPress site have a clear and significant purpose. Keeping unused plugins on your website slows it down, forcing visitors to use alternative means. Therefore, declutter any plugins you aren’t using and keep the ones you do use. After deactivation, run a test and see your website speed. You will realise that those unused slow down your website.
9. Spice up your WordPress: You may have been using your WordPress website for a long time, and there are definitely some old database files that need formatting, such as abandoned themes and plugins, spam comments, forgotten content to upload, and old emails. These files take up storage space and slow down your website. Therefore, ensure you clean them to save storage space. Plugins like WP Optimise and Advanced Database Cleaner can scan your website and detect the items to delete.
Implementing these highlighted actions would prevent you from having to think about why your website is slow.
Why speeding up your website matters for Business Owner.
1. Generate Leads: A stable, speedy website keeps visitors engaged and often brings them back. It also keeps customers engaged, leading them to seek more products and experience seamless shopping.
2. Search Engine Optimisation. With a fast website, you rank higher, giving you good visibility and helping potential customers become aware of your content and see your products.
3. Reliability and Professionalism. When people realise that your website stands out, they begin to see your competency and reliability. However, if your website speed doesn’t meet visitors’ expectations, it step erosion of trust and customers feel insecure.
4. Good Ad Conversion: A good, speedy website supports your marketing strategies and delivers the value you want.
5. Ability to Compete with Other Brands: Your brands stand a solid chance of staying among the top businesses, giving you the privilege to stay ahead of competitors.
6. Accessibility: Even with a slow connection, people can still reach out to your website.
7. Continuous Growth and Profitability: Your business has the grace to remain relevant and reach a wider audience for a long time.
Conclusion
Reading through the highlighted options on why and how you should speed up your website is enough to enlighten you on how speeding up your website plays a significant role in your business growth, visibility, and marketing.
