How to Speed Up Your WP Bakery WordPress Website
We live in the times of instant gratification. The human capacity to tolerate inconveniences has lessened greatly. Whether shopping physically at a grocery store or at an online retail, all of us demand expedited solutions.
Just the same way, website performance is of prime importance in delivering user satisfaction and progression of any business. Website optimization is crucial into maintaining your online presence and achieving higher conversion rates.
What Is The Impact Of Slow Site Speed?
With the passage of time, the World Wide Web has evolved to focus more on speed. SEO friendliness and mobile-friendly content sells more quickly. It’s a matter of seconds that what helps determine the success of your business. The first few seconds either help attract or drive back your visitors once they are directed to your website.
Initially, in April 2010, Google incorporated site speed in its ranking algorithms, meaning that a slow, sluggish website will start losing its ranking in the Google search engine— subsequently more visitors.
Highly responsive websites help increase user engagement, customer retention, and potential sales. According to a research carried out by Aberdeen Group, it has been observed that every second’s delay in site loading decreases customer satisfaction by 16%.
It is also noted that sluggish pages get views decreased to 11% while reducing the conversion rates by 7 percent! That is something you’ll never want for your business!
It is estimated that Amazon experienced a $1.6 billion drop in yearly sales owed to a one-second slowdown of their eCommerce site.
(Infographic by LoadStorm)
Speeds Helps SELL
It’s no big brainer— website optimization helps boost conversion rates! Mozilla experienced an increase of 60 million Firefox Downloads annually by increasing the page loading speed to 2.2 seconds!
Same is the case with Walmart. After the site speed optimization, the business saw a 2% improvement in conversion rates with each passing second!
Does Your WPBakery Website Take Too Long To Load?
Is your WordPress website taking ages to load? Do the pictures load sluggishly? And viewing product information appears seemingly impossible? If that’s the case, it’s a major RED flag!
The WPBakery plugin is super resourceful in terms of UI and visual pleasure, but it does tend to slow down the webpages at times. Just like all the other page builders, the plugin increases the page code size and scripts.
Packed with tons of themes from Theme Forest, the plug-in offers much flexibility with other add-ons. But it requires much strategy to optimize your website for higher conversion rates.
Also, the rise in the number of mobile users over a period of time has contributed to this WPBakery holdback. UI requires a totally different approach with varying (in this case smaller) screen sizes and data connection. Smartphones aren’t much friendly with over-the-top decorative sections and excessive widgets.
Ways To Optimize Your Website As A Beginner
In this blog, we’ll go ahead in discussing the six basic ways through which you can optimize your WPBakery WordPress website as a beginner.
- HOSTING
- CACHING PLUGIN
- CDN
- IMAGE OPTIMIZATION
- RESPONSIVE DESIGNS
- WIDGET OPTIMIZATION
Hosting Matters!
We can’t stress enough how important it is to prudently choose your website hosting server!
Usually, every website is planned out to perform well enough. But at times, the speed slacking is caused by the server on which your website is hosted on the internet.
It is better not to choose a hosting provider that hosts thousands of sites on a single shared server. This immense load makes the servers to slack and not perform. The most endearing web hosting provider for your WP Bakery WordPress website is the WP Engine by WordPress!
The WP Engine has a very user-friendly back-end along with top-notch customer support. Users get 24/7 live staff support. The support specialists are highly cooperative, professional, and knowledgeable in all of the aspects of the WordPress. They are your Number. 1 safety specialists in the time of need!
Install A Caching Plugin
One of the most effective ways to optimize your WPBakery website is by the use and installation of a caching plugin. The best available plugins are the W3 Total Cache and the WP Super Cache that help reduce down the page’s loading time.
They are highly compatible with other shared hosting and dedicated servers. A caching plugin provides cached copies of your content to the end-user.
You can install and activate these caching plugins on your WPBakery website to help improve the user experience without changing the theme, the plugins or any other aspect of your WordPress site. Caching plugins help reduce:
– MySQL database access
– Number of PHP and HTTP requests
– Server access to static resources
Setup A Content Delivery Network
You can speed up your website by offloading the static resources of your webpages. This could be achieved by setting up a CDN on your website to quickly load images, scripts, and CSS files for your visitors. CDN helps take off the load from your primary server by allowing it to serve the rest of your website. The primary server performs well this way and the pages load faster!
CDN’s distributive property allows the static resources to be served by the server closest to your visitors. No matter how heavy the website is— it’ll load faster for your users. The Content Delivery Network that works best with a WordPress website is MaxCDN. It can practically reduce loading time down to several seconds!
Also, the MaxCDN can be set up within 5 minutes if activated using a caching plugin like the W3 Total Cache.
Compress Your Images
Image optimization is highly necessary to help your website perform better. You can compress the images featured on your website without compromising on their image resolution.
Yahoo provides a useful image optimizer called the Smush.it. Though this optimizer doesn’t allow users to automatically compress images at large, it significantly reduces the file size without compromising the overall image quality. The entire process is quite time-consuming.
But luckily, there’s a free-of-cost plugin called the WP-SmushIt that provides automated optimization. If you’re a Mac user, then you can download Squash for effective, lossless compression.
Responsive Themes Are Lifesavers
It is highly important to use responsive themes for higher performance of websites. Since the Google algorithms favour responsive sites greatly— meaning you’ll be ranked higher in the searches.
WPBakery provides greater responsiveness and the ability to fine-tune any layout. Make sure you have the responsiveness setting turned on in the back-end for the greater convenience of mobile users.
The option allows you to specify content loading for specific types of users based on the screen dimensions. It helps mobile users to avoid heavy-loading images while preventing desktop users from seeing small, and extremely compressed images.
Cancel Out Any Irrelevant Widgets
Widget optimization greatly helps in optimizing your website’s performance. You can optimize the use of widgets to help the site load faster. Avoiding additional and unnecessary widgets is the best practice into achieving a fast loading website. Social media widgets like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google+ excessively load JavaScripts and CSS files.
You can exclude all of the unnecessary widgets from the Homepage and include them only in blog posts. It is best to remove inactive widgets that you no longer need.
This way, widget optimization will help minimize the need to rely on external servers.
Conclusion
If you face a lot of lag on the front-end of your WPBakery website, the issue may lie with the many large images placed on the page. You can have a look at the modules and tweak them to resize the images decently. This will help mitigate any troubles in scrolling down the page. And also resolve the issue without having to deal with any complicated resolutions.
In short, a slower load time is very bad for your business in the long run. Search engines like the Google and Bing prefer websites that load faster.
As a beginner, you can try out the discussed methods to efficiently resolve the issue at hand. You can also monitor your website’s existing load time by performing certain Speed Tests. Website loading time under 3 seconds is quite decent enough, and pretty phenomenal if under two seconds!
You can also consult Google’s PageSpeed Insights for detailed information as how to further improve your website’s performance. It is highly important to always remember that a good PageSpeed score isn’t everything. But a greatly reduced load time is!
