You need to have a fast loading website. Without a website that loads quickly, you will lose customers, your website visitors will have a poor user experience and it will have an impact on your SEO ranking. There are many tools and best practices you can use to speed up your WordPress website and to create a better experience for your visitors.
Firstly, you need to have a good hosting provider and make sure you are using one of their higher tier packages. I would strongly avoid going for a cheap option. Having a fast web server plays a key role in how well your website performs when people visit the site.
You need to make use of caching plugins. These speed up the time it takes for pages to load using a long list of specific technical features. There are both free and paid plugins for this, and you need to make sure you configure them correctly, as some come with a large feature list.
Compressing images and Image Optimisation is important to improve the speed of your website. Also, making sure that you upload images with smaller file sizes or using formats such as using JPEG and not PNG, will greatly improve the performance of your website. There are both free and paid plugins that will automatically optimise your website images for you.
The WordPress Theme you choose for your website plays a key factor in performance. You want a template that is coded well and isn’t bloated with unnecessary features.
“47% of website users expect any webpage to load in under two seconds.”
You can enable GZIP compression on your cPanel server to improve performance. This will dramatically reduce the bandwidth usage and the time it takes to access your website. GZIP compresses files on your website so that whenever a visitor tries to access your website; their browser will first have to unzip the website. This process brings down the bandwidth usage to a considerable extent.
It is very important that you consider the speed and performance of your website and do regular testing. Slow websites will receive less traffic, a drop in search engine ranking, poor customer experience, high bounce rates, and even having your website crash and be blacklisted by Google.