How to Improve SEO? Website speed is important. Websites that load faster don’t leave that bad aftertaste in your visitor’s mouth. Not only does it help with user experience, but it also contributes to higher conversions and higher Improve SEO search rankings.

What does fast really mean?

We’d all like our site to load as soon as we type the address in the address bar of our favourite browser and hit enter. Unfortunately, most of us have to face reality where load time is anywhere from 1 to 10 seconds.

If it’s over 10 seconds – you’re losing visitors and money. If it’s under 3 seconds – you’re doing just fine. Everything in between – you should work on improving the speed of your website.

Before we jump into all the ways you can use to improve the speed of your site, let’s first address why you should spend your valuable time and energy on optimizing load speed. After all, isn’t your time better spent producing new content, adding new features or products to your site?

Partner with the right web host

Often overlooked, choosing the right web host is one of the key components of every successful website. You don’t see a profitable business hosting their website on a free shared hosting with thousands of other sites. Sure, it’s a good deal when you’re just starting out – but once your website starts to get traction, that extra performance boost that comes from premium hosting will pay for itself over and over again.

Switch to PHP 7

PHP 7 is a real game changer in the programming language that powers as much as 82% of the web. The update comes with the brand-new version of the PHP engine called phpng, written to decrease memory consumption and increase performance. PHP7 makes your WordPress almost 2 times faster. One WordPress request on PHP 5.6 executes just under 100M CPU instructions, while PHP7 only executes 25M to do the same job.

Start using CDN

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of servers deployed in multiple data centres around the world. This ensures that, for example, your end user from Paris isn’t served content from your server in USA, but rather gets it from a server in Europe ensuring higher availability and speed.

The great thing about Hostinger is that you get a blazing fast speed site without having to worry about setting up CDNs or messing with .htaccess file.

Use a good WordPress theme

Investing in a good WordPress theme from the start will help you avoid lots of problems. Designers often get a little carried away with designing themes that look great visually, but just don’t perform that well in terms of speed, SEO or conversions. The solution? You can either go minimal or use minimal themes, that are not feature rich. Or you could use one of the fastest loading WordPress themes.

Optimize your images

Optimize all of your images before you use them on your WordPress website. Use exactly the required size of the image. For example, if your featured image is 800px wide, upload the image that is exactly the same size.

Remove all plugins you don’t need or use

As an advanced WordPress user, you already know how easy it is to start using a new plugin. Sooner or later you’ll find that your website is using dozens of these plugins. Often when performing a plugin audit, you’ll find that you’re not actually using all of these plugins, but they still require loading different CSS and JavaScript files. Remove the plugins you don’t use or need anymore.