The speed of your WordPress website is important for SEO and also for retaining site visitors and converting them to prospects or customers. Various
studies by Google, CloudFlare and others have consistently found that bounce rates go down and conversion rates get better as site speed improves, sometimes dramatically. For example, according to Google, as page load time goes from 1s to 5s, the probability of a visitor bouncing increases 90%! *
Before racing down the road of optimizing your site speed, we recommend that you read The Problems with Google PageSpeed Insights so that you are certain you are measuring the performance of your site by the correct metrics. If you are just using the “grades” that Google and other site speed tests provide, you may be mis-informed. The only true metric is page load speed.
If you have a WordPress site that is slow, here are some ways you can improve its speed. The list below is not comprehensive and different sites will have different reasons for why they are slow, but we’ve ordered the list in terms of what we’ve found to have the greatest effect on speed, with the most impactful at the top.