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Did you know that a one second delay in website speed decreases conversions by 7%?
But what does that actually mean?
According to Google, if I increased my website speed by 1 second…
…I would make an extra $28,464 per year!
But why does that happen?
It’s because-
How much money are you unknowingly leaving on the table?
I suggest you run the numbers to find out.
Because with the few simple changes that I am going to share with you…
Anyone can increase their website speed, decrease their bounce rate and give a much better user experience.
What Will I Learn?
Increasing your website speed is easy and you can do it without spending any money!
And no matter how fast your site is right now it can definitely be made faster!
You can usually improve things without any help from a developer, you just need the right combination of-
So follow the steps below and your site will be faster in no time at all!
Before we do anything else, we need to get a benchmark of where we are right now in terms of our websites speed.
The results of this might be shocking but don’t worry, we are going to take of everything together in a moment.
First – capture data for you homepage and 2x other pages from-
Create a spreadsheet like this one (Template > File > Make a Copy)-
Once you’ve got a baseline of where you are right now.
It’s time to go to work!
If you don’t already have a caching plugin installed, install one now!
You can use the free W3 Total Cache plugin to enable caching for your blog. Just follow this guide to get it running.
It’s a quick, free and easy way to activate caching on your site and it’s really customizable.
Note: Be careful with minifying or optimising your Javascript files, it will probably break things.
Images are one of the major contributing factors to slow websites.
That’s because image files are often unnecessarily large and can be compressed to shave off huge amounts of page size.
I managed to shave 46% off my image sizes across the blog-
I use ShortPixel to reduce the size but you can also use the free WP Smush plugin as well which I used for many years.
In fact:
It’s worth noting that all my images were already compressed with WP Smush before ShortPixel compressed them by an additional 46%.
But if you are on a budget, the WP Smush plugin will still do some serious compression for you and it only takes 1 click-
It might take a while, but once it’s done you will have shaved off significant page size for free!
The next step is to lazy load all of your media.
Now if your the type of person that HATES the lazy load experience because it makes the page jump around – don’t worry.
I hate that as well!
The best free plugin for you to use here is Lazy Loader but make sure it is effective by setting it up like this-
Pay close attention to the “Include lazysizes aspectratio plugin” option that will prevent the page jumping around like crazy.
BUT:
There is one problem with this solution.
If you do choose to deploy WebP images with ShortPixel, the only lazy load plugin I have found that actually works with the picture tag is WPRocket–
And that’s going to cost you a little, but that is what is powering the lazy load across this blog right now. You should checkout my full WP Rocket review to learn more.
CloudFlare is a free content delivery network that comes with a bunch of other performance enhancing features.
It’s free and integrates with W3 Total Cache, WPRocket & ShortPixel.
Configuring this tool is a little beyond the scope of this article…
So I’ll refer you to this excellent tutorial to get it setup.
I’ll just leave this here in case you are unfamiliar with content delivery networks…
Once you’ve made all of these changes…
It’s time to test your site again, so head back over to the tools-
And run each of your URL’s through them again to see if you have improved (I guarantee you have).
These are the results I had before:
But after a lot of testing and tweaking with various combinations of different plugins…
…I was able to make some significant improvements-
Here are the headlines-
All of these improvements were made with the ultimate setup that I am sharing below.
Please post screenshot of your results in the comments!
If you follow the 6x steps above, you can increase your website speed without spending a penny and also give a better user experience and increase sales.
But if you are serious about increasing your website speed and improving your core web vitals…
…you need to invest a little bit of money.
I’ve spent lot’s of time testing different combinations of services and plugins on this blog.
This is the final combination I settled on and what is currently powering things behind the scenes on my sites to get a faster load speed-
It has a ton of features that you don’t get in W3 Total Cache like combining and optimising Google Font files.
All the way through to optimizing Google Analytics and your Facebook Pixel-
As you can see it’s easy to use and it’s jam packed with a bunch of features all focused on making your website load faster.
Take a look at my NitroPack review if you want a solid alternative.
ShortPixel took images that had already being compressed with the free WPSmush plugin and then compressed them a futher 46%-
Not only that:
But you can shave an additional 25-36% off your images by clicking 2 boxes to deploy the WebP image format-
These are also compatible with WPRocket’s lazy loading feature! Double whammy!
Your website’s speed starts with the foundation that your site is built on.
Tweaks and plugins can only get you so far.
So if you are serious about increasing your website’s speed, you might want to consider changing your hosting.
Especially if you’re paying less than $10/mo for your current host because your website is likely stuck on a server with thousands of other sites slowing you down.
I recently built 12 sites on 12 of the “fastest” hosts to find out who really offers the fastest Wordpress hosting.
And surprisingly, the most expensive hosting WAS NOT the fastest Wordpress hosting.
When I switched to WordPress focused hosting a few years back, I instantly shaved one second off my load time AND they did the migration for me:
There are two hosting services I’d advise you to use-
They boast that they’re the fastest WordPress hosting in the world and my testing confirmed it.
They beat out much more expensive hosts in nearly every test category.
Their packages start from around $20/month and you can host 5 websites.
Plus they offer free migrations which really takes the headache out of moving host!
Not only are they the fastest Wordpress host, but they also have excellent support!
Plus who can argue with feedback like this from social media-
And WPXHosting includes a bunch of awesome features like one click backups, a staging site, free SSL AND an excellent CDN service!
Please see my dedicated WPX Hosting review for more information.
They are the current host of this blog.
(that may change in the future seeing as WPX Hosting won my test AND are cheaper)
It’s more expensive at $30 per month and you can host 1 website.
But most importantly they have their own server level caching solution that’s built on the Google cloud platform.
They also performed well in my Wordpress hosting test and offer things like free migrations, one click backups, a staging site, free SSL AND free CDN!
The support is top notch as well! I am constantly throwing them weird problems to solve and they go the extra mile to solve them.
They offer services like cloud storage to help reduce the amount of stored information.
Regardless of which one you choose…
You will see improvements in page load times across the board if you do.
Your website speed is paramount to the success of your business.
Not only is it one of Google’s official ranking factors, but it’s one of your customers rankings factors as well but is a common problem in todays digital marketing-
Even a short delay could cost your businesses thousands of dollars.
On the other hand a small improvement could seriously increase your bottom line.
You’ve got 2 choices on how to do that-
If you follow either of those paths, you’ll see a drastic change in your website’s speed, your bounce rate should decrease and you’ll build a happy customer base who have no reason to leave.
And once you have taken care of that and ensured you can provide a great user experience on mobile devices and desktops…
You might want to take advantage of another confirmed Google ranking factor – HTTPS.
202 Responses
Great, Matt excellent post. I was reading one of your post and this post brought me to this other and I feel very happy and motivated. I’ll put your advice into practice immediately.
Good luck Walder 🙂
Hi Matt,Thank you again for an excellent tutorial on a subject we all struggle with. A quick question, does customizing the robot.txt files to exclude indexing of duplicate content like categories, archives etc… also have an impact on overall speed of the site?Cheers 🙂
Not on speed but on overall indexing!
I agree regarding your WPEngine recommendation on this page. Quite confusing since this post has an updated posting date, and I had previously read your WPEngine review.I’d be interested to know how your site currently performs since you moved away from WPEngine.
I’m guessing you missed the bit that says – Update: Please read my WPEngine update. ?If you read that update https://searchlogistics.com/seo/reviews/wp-engine/ you can see how TPH perform in comparison.
Great article as always.I think you should put an update on this page at the WPEngine section stating you dont recommend them with a link to https://searchlogistics.com/seo/reviews/wp-engine/Cheers.Vietnamrum
Nice spot 🙂 I updated the original review but missed that – updated thanks 🙂
Great thank you!
Hey Matt are you still using wp engine? I heard a while back that they were bought buy another company and service is not as good any more. Thanks Josh
Not really – https://searchlogistics.com/seo/reviews/wp-engine/
Fantastic post Mathew, going to take advantage of your recommendations. I ran the test for my site and it pretty much came out same as your before making the changes.I have the smush it plugin but didn’t know about deactivating it. Plan on implementing your suggestions except for changing hosts. I like Blue host and have been using them for 4 years now.
Great to hear you’ve managed to speed things up 🙂
I could not imagine paying $30 each month for my network sites. Would go broke really fast.
I wouldnt use this for my network sites either
Hi Ryan,There are a number of studies around about this by people that have isolated that metric to measure its impact.The thing I would love to isolate and measure with it though is how site speed affects rankings.
I decided to follow-up on an email I had received from you. OMG! You have exposed me to another world. I am very thankful and excited.Your instructional style is perfect for me and I am sure others. Keep up the wonderful work and I will continue to share your knowledge with others.
Thanks very much 🙂
Ok thanks Matt.I do enjoy your post(s) tremendously, but it would be cool to find a way to quantify the increase in site speed. Though I think that would be extremely hard to do.Thanks,Ryan
It has been nearly a year. Do you feel increasing the speed of your site has added more money to your pocket? How are you quantifying this? Granted your reports every month have shown increases, but is there really anyway to track this?Thanks!
Yes for sure, I get huge amounts of feedback about how fast the site is so its definitely keeping people engaged and converting!
Thank you, this is the information I need and I will apply to my website 😀
No worrys 🙂
You’ve done it again Matt! Great tutorial! I’m gonna go speed up my site now!
Thanks Jeff!
For people who are using VPS or Dedicated Server, you can try with Varnish cache layer before your web server software like: apache, nginx,…You will be very surprised because of its performance. I believe your site will response in milliseconds (not second right now). I’ve used Varnish in some of my websites written on my own CMS and Yii framework, not Wordpress but I’ve also search on Google and found out that there are some tutorials guide you how to implement it. Hope this helps.
That’s great to hear!
Hey Matt, just to follow up on this – they gave me 3 months worth of hosting for free because of all the trouble. Thanks again!
Great tutorial! There’s definitely a lot more I could be doing to speed up my sites, this post has inspired me to take some action!
Hustle hustle ^^
Great article Matt, you posted it at a perfect time for my business as we just updated our site and was looking to reduce the load time and increase speed. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Let me know if you get stuck or need any help!
No worrys – glad to hear its sorted sorry about the problems!
Yes, it’s pretty unfortunate. They kept their promise though, and fixed everything sooner than expected. I did ask for kind of compensation and they promised they will take care of it. Thanks for the replies Matt!
Hey, I guess I am just unlucky then! This is what happened: “Around Noon CST today the server that hosts your site encountered a catastrophic hardware failure. Our Datacenter partner Linode immediately initiated emergency procedures to bring the server back online. Over the last 4 hours, we have been attempting to bring the server online and now believe it is beyond repair.” They go on to say they will move my site to a completely new server, etc.
Ahhh well to have to replace an entire server sounds pretty hardcore to be honest, just luck of the draw with that and I was on a different server.Push for some compensation though 🙂
Hey Matt, how’s your downtime with WPengine?I have pretty bad experience with them so far (downtime, they don’t have their own DNS, nor email servers), since I signed up with them 5 months ago. Today there was a “catastrophic failure” of the server and my site will be down for at least 24 hours and reversed to 2 days before, in best case scenario. I had a couple of problems on HostGator, but never this often and especially not of this magnitude.
According to my pingdom account zero in the last 6 months.What happened exactly?
Love your posts. The best thing about this or any other article of yours is the way you write “title of the post”. That’s why inspite of having extremely busy schedule you consumed my 20 minutes. By the way it’s all worthwhile.
Thanks – I’ve actually had complaints about the titles before lol
Hey MattThanks for this post. My adsense account told me my site was on the slow side so this has come just at the right time.
Let me know how you get on!
Its the WPEngine personal plan with the CDN addon
The nameservers are with stablehost but WPEngine doesn’t use nameservers for its hosting configuration, its just an A record on the DNS.
Actually it looks more like linode. Anyway let me know what exact hosting.plan you use. I noticed load time of your site is pretty good, even you have a lot of object on pages. For example loading my site takes longer time there are 5x less http requests that there.
As far as I can see this site is still hosted on stablehost. It uses stablehost DNS.
Hi Matt,quick question, why is your page rank so low?
Hi,https://searchlogistics.com/seo/link-building/zero-links/
Nice article Matt,Never thought that the load time can affect the conversions rate. But I see that you use WPEngine hosting, is it better than other hosts like HostGator or Bluehost.I am on HG and am not facing issues with it.What are your views on it ?
Hi,Do a speed test and see how it performs for you – there is a huge difference between budget shared hosting and professional hosting.
Hi Matt,What was the other host with $0.99 per month?
Hi,That was https://searchlogistics.com/get/stablehost/
Hi Matt, great article. I just used some of your steps to optimise a voucher code site that I haven’t done anything with in a while. 1st TEST: pingdom was showing load time of 4.25s and page size of 675.1KB performance grade of 83/100- removed a plugin which was not in use. Ran the test again2nd TEST: pingdom now showing 2.91s and page size of 650.3KB performance grade 85/100- linked to google to load jquery.js instead of loading locally3rd TEST: pingdom now showing 1.44s :)Still got the images to reduce but I remember using smush.it before to do most of them
Hi Gary,Great results! Amazing to see how an inactive plugin was holding you back that much!Thats money right there!
Hey Matthew, thanks for the post. Love it, almost tempted to switch, but then I saw the price. What about just switching over to Cloud Fare for the poor guys?
Hi,Yes they are a premium host and you should integrate the other suggestions first (although the host change had the biggest impact) – you can certainly give cloudflare a bash but make sure you measure the before/after effect!
The support is awesome, they take care of the updates – its all fully managed!
What more does it do? Besides speed what do you get more?
IMHO you could get the same results by using w3total cache or any other caching plugin together with a cdn like maxcdn. This will have been cheaper than using wpengine. However though wpengine has some unique features. But is it worth it price? I don’t know
Hi,Yes you can use that combination and I do so on my other sites (that exact setup actually) – but WPEngine do so much more than that 🙂
Hi Matt, Great post! All I ever do is use WP Super Cache and a CDN while on shared hosting (hostgator). But after reading your post, I’m excited to try out some code and image optimization!
No worrys – I’m going to hire someone to do the entire blog properly once I’ve stopped tweaking it lol
With the exception of the hosting (which really depends on the client’s preference), I think most of tips here are great.
Thanks :)Although if the current host is affecting the clients conversion, it should not be their ‘preference’
Matthew you a rock star. I’ve been using wpengine for a while now with my sites and clients sites. Love it. Only down fall is they don’t handle email…. not a huge biggie, but be nice to have the option.You also added a few more todo’s for my team to get site speed even tighter. Love the way you positioned this post.
Yeah I’ve got to say out of all the hosts I’ve used the past 10 years I have been more impressed with WPEngine than any other. Even my dealings with RackSpace left a lot to be desired.I’m all about conversion rate optimization and extracting value and site speed is often overlooked as a crucial factor in that.P.s. the email problem is easily solved with http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/outlook-handles-email-domain-hosting/
Hi Matt,Linode is showing up as your host on a sneeky whois search.You have a UK website are you hosting it in the states or in the UK and are you still with Wpengine ?How have they been ?Like your blog keep it up!
Hi,Yes I’m still with WPEngine and intend to stick with them for the performance gain it offers. The site is now hosted in the USA though but my audience is 25% USA, 20% UK and 5% India which is why I tested from all 3 locations :)The support is superb!
Very cool post. Almost convinced me to sign-up to WP Engine. Good job hah 🙂
Your site is already pretty speedy =D
I learned more from this post than 95% of all other articles ever read! I new a bit about this, but I didn’t think there was this much to it. I’m turning up the heat and maximizing my site for better results from my existing traffic!
Thanks very much 🙂 Your site definitely needs the speed treatment!
Hi Matthew,Great tutorial. What about W3 total Cache? Do you also use it to speed up your site?
Hi,No WPEngine have their own custom written hardware based caching system so there is no need for separate caching plugins like W3 Total Cache.
Traffic influences the revenue, instead of the loading time of a website.Of course, loading speed of each website must me fast for all visitors, don’t use any heavy scripts which cause a site get slower. If a site get loads of traffic, consider VPS hosting or dedicated servers as main web hosting, not “shared” servers. e.g: 50,000+ unique visitors per month.Both are more expensive but good investment for huge traffic.
Hi,Yes traffic does influence revenue but design/speed/conversion influences it much more. You can be sure I earn more money from 100 visitors than most people earn from 1000.
Great write up Matt!Look’s like I’ll be upgrading to a new host, soon. Your blog is coming along pretty well. This year should be a good one, and I’m sure I’ll be around to watch it grow even bigger.Take care,Casey
Hi Casey,Thanks very much – it’s getting there slowly now 🙂
Small sites cant afford the luxury of hosting. I have also heard of thesis framework or something which will speed up and rank website fast. Are you using wpengine or linode servers ?
Hi,Well regardless of the size of your site, the fact of the matter is for every second longer it takes to load – you lose 7% of your profits. Perhaps poor hosting is why they cant afford good hosting ^^Thesis is a lightweight framework/theme for Wordpress – I have investigated getting the site converted to it but the cost vs reward was borderline.
Wow, super great and very detailed post about optimizing site speed. Awesome.I don’t think that i can afford $50 per month for hosting yet, but when i do, i think i’ll also migrate (hostgator can be really slow sometimes).And i found several awesome free plugin from this tutorial, thanks a lot!
Hi,Well when your blog reaches that stage you can pat yourself on the back 🙂 I had noticed that with the increase visitor load the site and especially tutorial pages were performing poorly so it had outgrown the host =DI would say over and above that it is worth spending time minimising http requests for good results.
is it true that his influence for it?
Yikes I thought I knew a lot about this and you’ve given me a lot more to do – removing Smush it is a real surprise!Thanks for all the detail and references Matt.
No worrys hope it helps you out!
Thanks for that Matthew, as always a very detailed and well written article. I’m not sure I’ll change my hosting just yet, but I’ll certainly look at implementing some of your other suggestions. It’ll be interesting to see how much difference to your revenue the speed increase will make, if indeed it’s possible for you to quantify it.
No worrys let me know how it goes!