The speed of a website is an indicator of an agency’s service quality. 40% of consumers will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. If your sites don’t load quickly, half of your potential customers will be gone at the blink of an eye.
Meanwhile, a fast-loading website evokes three key emotions in users: satisfaction, positive perception, and trust. These feelings are crucial for building a strong and lasting relationship with your audience.
At White Label Agency, speed is one of our main priorities. It’s central across all our services, starting from WordPress development projects to maintenance plans. We know, that a fast-loading website is the first sign of a well-functioning platform. So if your agency wants to attract clients and give them value, let’s dive into the question: how can you optimize website speed for WordPress?
Instant steps to boost website speed
Some things can be done instantly to improve website speed.
Web hosting
Prioritizing hosting is essential for any digital agency looking to provide a fast response to their visitors, anytime and anywhere. A reliable hosting provider handles the traffic without affecting your website’s scalability.
Here’s what our CEO Einar has to say about hosting:
“The most common that I’ve seen is that a client (i.e. your client, the website owner) already has a hosting that they prefer to keep. If it’s slow – recommend them an upgrade to a better one, maybe including your retainer contract.
You get what you pay for and there are many good options that our partners use, but WP Engine is probably the favorite among them.”
The key to a good hosting provider is fast and stable servers. Stable servers provide a low downtime rate, which means periods, when the website is unavailable, are minimized.
A host takes care of all the caching and backups that your website may need. Caching is the process of storing frequently used data, such as images, files, and other multimedia. Therefore, the access for the visitors is faster when they revisit the page. For optimal performance, cashing and content delivery network (CDN) form the ultimate team.
CDN delivers your site’s elements to visitors from a closer server to their location. Especially, it becomes a strong helping hand if your site contains data centers over long distances. CDN helps reduce the number of HTTP requests made to your original server. The main purpose of the tool is to avoid lag in content delivery.
Finally, take into consideration your hosting provider’s support team. A 24/7 support system would be the perfect solution for your agency for any emergency or assistance.
Optimize images
To maintain fast-loading speeds, optimizing your website’s images is crucial. Skipping this step affects user experience, which means poor SEO rankings and higher bounce rates. According to Google By compressing images and text, 25% of pages could save more than 250KB and 10% can save more than 1MB (which contributes to page load times).
Before uploading a photo, you can always use photo editing tools to resize and adjust from their original format. Large images get in the way of having optimal speed since they carry unnecessary data.
TinyPNG can be the perfect solution for agencies to avoid this issue. Additionally, it is free and sometimes can reduce image file size by more than 80%, without decreasing the quality of the image.
SERVICES
WordPress website building
We support marketing agencies with WordPress website building services. Use our white label team to deliver professional websites.
Longer-term initiatives to enhance speed
In addition to immediate actions, there are also some longer term approaches to ensuring website speed.
Keep your WordPress site updated
No matter how helpful the WordPress platform can be, without updating its elements, you will soon face security threats alongside a slow-loading website. By staying current with the latest version of WordPress themes and plugins, your agency ensures your website is free of outdated elements.
Plugins, that have been used for a long time often lack the features for optimizing speed. Newer versions include improved tools for speed-enhancing and caching mechanisms in their package.
Delete unused elements
Aside from the importance of an updated site, it is crucial to delete unused elements from your website. If not managed, your WordPress database will gradually collect unnecessary data over time. This clutter will be the primary reason for slowing down your website speed. An easy solution to avoid this issue is regular cleanups, which help to prevent unnecessary bloat of your database. A simple example of database clutter could be unused media files. Images that are no longer used can take up valuable storage space and potentially slow down your website.
Additional tips for speed optimization
Use Lazy Loading
Lazy Loading can be an effective solution for websites with many visual displays. The lazy loading tool doesn’t display images until the visitor approaches the specific section on their website. This way, only the visible content is loaded immediately. The rest of the data such as large video or image content loads as the visitor scrolls down. At WLA, we find helpful a3 Lazy Load and Lazy Loader.
You might be wondering how can it be helpful for the page speed.
Not displaying your whole content right away, decreases the strain on your hosting server. That positively affects search engine rankings and better performance, especially for high-traffic websites.
Choose a Lightweight Theme
Overloaded themes with unnecessary features don’t optimize website speed effectively. While choosing a theme take into consideration the content that you are creating. Additional features that aren’t useful for your content only create clutter and don’t help with speed optimization. An impressive-looking theme could be heavily coded with animations, flashy themes, etc. Unnecessary elements slow down your website’s loading speed.
Additionally, You can always add plugins that won’t compromise the functionality and help with the beautiful web-design creation process.
For more information about effective plugins and how to optimize website speed, read our article on WordPress plugins to optimize speed.
SERVICES
Adobe XD to WordPress
Adobe XD is the favorite design tool for many digital agencies. If you provide us with the design files, our development team can do the Adobe XD to WordPress conversion for you.
Elevate your speed with White Label Agency
At White Label Agency, we understand the significance of page speed to maintain high SEO rankings and a user experience. Our performance check scans clients’ websites and grades their performance. Reliability through WP-Engine hosting, including maintenance and website updates helps us to detect any speed issues throughout the development process.
If you’re seeking a fast, efficient, and reliable solution for your website speed, don’t hesitate to reach out to our sales team at White Label Agency. With 3000 WordPress projects per year, we can help you reach optimal speed for your website.
