At least every month or so, perform a speed test on your blog. Remember to not only check the landing or home page, but also your blog posts. You want to do the blog posts because that’s likely the pages that a user comes into when they find your site through organic search!
If someone doesn’t stick around waiting for your site to load, it typically won’t even display as a visit in your Google metrics under Google Analytics. Don’t turn off the customer before they even get a chance to see your great content!
Some ways to test your speed or site loading are the following tools. You plug in the URL to test, it will run some tests, then provide results.
These site speed tools include:
These tools will provide you your results and recommendations to follow to improve your speed.
Some common reasons for poor loading of your site are things like:
- Hosting platform/level – As your site grows and you get more traffic, you’ll likely have to ramp up from the bare minimum hosting plans.
- Too many plugins – This can cause issues as it is more to load on when people visit your site. Its best to just pare down to what you use for both performance and security sake.
- Large images – Images do not need to be the largest you can download, but more so should be “right-sized” and compressed.
- No caching – Caching can be enabled to increase performance and site speed through popular WordPress plug-ins.
