Posted at 11:28h in Web Design, WordPress

Website speed is important. Fast sites have better SEO and convert more clicks to customers. Slow sites annoy users and drive up bounce rates. Yet, speeding up WordPress can be complicated. Minify CSS, HTML & Javascript. Compression. Browser caching. What does it all mean? In this article we show how simply moving to a truly optimised hosting environment can triple site performance without tons of technical overhead. One simple change. A super fast site. What’s not to like?   Hosting with WP Engine When it comes to website hosting you get what you pay for. Skimp here and performance will suffer. And all the...

Posted at 13:01h in Web Design, WordPress

In this article, I highlight the best plugins to use to improve your WordPress website's page speed. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading my previous blog post on optimising the images on your website before going through this blog post. If you have large, unoptimised images then it is likely that this is what is slowing down your website the most. If you’ve optimised all of your images correctly, you might find there are still issues found in the testers, such as needing to minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. A lot of these issues can, however, be fixed by installing...

Posted at 11:00h in Web Design

More often than not, images are going to be the main reason why your website is producing poor results when it comes to speed. I’ve tested many sites and images are often the priority in speed testers. Most of the time, images can be optimised to save a few kilobytes of data. However, occasionally I’ve found a single image to be over 1MB, and as the recommended size of the page itself is around 3MB, this can have a huge effect on the speed of your website as the user will have to wait much longer for an image which doesn’t...

Posted at 12:00h in Web Design, WordPress

If you own a WordPress website, you’ll likely be aware of the concept of themes and plugins. Themes and plugins are some of the core functionalities of WordPress and are required if you don’t want to use the simplistic default appearance. Themes exist to give you more customisation to your website and so that your website looks unique. There are plenty of themes available - some free and some premium - so you may find yourself spending a very long amount of time trying to find the perfect theme. One consideration that is often missed is how fast the theme is. If you’ve...

Posted at 12:30h in SEO, Web Design

In 2018, improving the speed of your website has now moved from being an option to a necessity. Google is starting to downgrade slow websites and users expect speedy sites. Two recent studies have shown the impact of a single additional second of loading time: 1 second costs Amazon $1.6 billion in sales and every additional second of loading time causes 10% of users to leave the BBC website. And this impact is just as pronounced in the small business world. By speeding up your website you can improve your SEO and maximise the number of clicks that turn into customers. This...