3 Tips For Optimising Your WordPress Website

With the immense amount of resources at your fingertips, creating an attractive WordPress website that looks great has never been easier. However web designers advise that building a website that’s search engine and user friendly is about more than just looks. If your site doesn’t function right, then people won’t hang around and you’ll develop a poor reputation in the web space.

Luckily for you, there’s a few small things that you can do behind the scenes to improve the performance of your website dramatically. The three tips listed below will help you speed up your website, improve the user experience and ultimately, will help you achieve a lower bounce rate and a higher visitor retention rate.

1. Make Sure You Use A Good Hosting Provider!

If you’re running on a tight budget and trying to create a website that doesn’t cost a fortune, then it can be tempting to try and save as much money on hosting as you can. I mean, there’s even a few free WordPress hosting providers out there, so you may as well use them, right?

Wrong!

Don’t fall into the trap of using a cheap or free hosting provider who doesn’t allocate enough resources to your website and who doesn’t guarantee at least 99.9% uptime. Using a good hosting provider will improve your page load times, will make sure that your website is always accessible and will help improve your reputation in the competitive digital space.

2. Don’t Use Too Many Plugins

Plugins are great – when they’re used right. They can make your website run smoothly, can improve the user experience and can make your life a whole lot easier. However, the huge WordPress plugin library can make it tempting to just keep adding new plugins to your site.

This is where things can go wrong. Every new plugin you add will slow your website down and require more resources to load. This can detract from the user experience, increasing your bounce rate and decrease the percentage of returning visitors that you get. Limit your plugins to those that are absolutely necessary.

3. Make Sure Your Images Are Optimised

If you’re not careful, your website’s images can take up a lot of space and resources. Large images can make your site load slower, which will reduce your SEO score and increase your bounce rate.

There are a number of ways to make sure that your images are optimised. First, you could manually compress all your images before uploading them to the WordPress dashboard. This will ensure that things are done right. Alternatively, you could use an image compression tool or plugin to automate the process, which is particularly useful if you manage a large website.

Final Word

Using a few small tricks, you can dramatically improve your WordPress website, decreasing page load times, increasing uptime and improving visitor retention. Optimising your website using the tips outlined above is great for SEO because they will help improve your site speed and reduce your bounce rate. Good luck!