If you are not giving it the importance that the loading speed of your WordPress website deserves, let me tell you how it affects you.

Google has long warned that it would take it into account when positioning a website in the results.

I will give you the 5 main reasons why you should not have a slow website:

#1 Google and the 3-second rules

According to Google, 3 seconds is the maximum waiting time for most users.

If your website exceeds that time to load, it risks your website rank. However, I personally recommend that the loading time is less than 2 seconds. On May 28th, 2020, Google revealed that there will be an upcoming page experience update that will enhance the existing Core Web Vitals metrics.

#2 User experience counts and a lot

Optimizing your website for Google is a must. However, have you ever thought about your users? Are you giving them good user experience?

It is no use for paying the traffic if the users get bored of waiting for your website to load. They will more likely close the tab and leave. You will waste your money and time. That way

#3 You are losing sales and you do NOT know

So, you spend days and weeks reviewing sales statistics reports. You see that you have a low conversion rate and you don’t sell enough. Now, you wonder every day what you’re failing.

Don’t worry, I already tell you.

The factor why you do not sell more is because your website takes longer than it should load. The lower your site to load, the lower the chance for you to convert your readers into customers.

Even Amazon loses a percentage of its sales every time their website load 100ms slower.

#4 You will pay for more hosting resources if your site is slow

If you can optimize your website, you could have better loading times and consume fewer resources.

Then, you can work with much cheaper web hosting plans. That way, you can save your money for other expenses.

Factors that influence the loading speed

Now, let me review the factors that you have to control so that your website gets a good loading speed.

4.1 The Hosting Provider

This is the first culprit that many web pages do not have adequate loading speed. You should avoid unmanaged Hosting at all costs. Sometimes, their cPanel is outdated. They even have more downtime than uptime.

Many of these companies do not give importance to their customers’ businesses and just want your money. Therefore, I have made a list of the minimum hosting specification you need to make your website load fast:

• SSD hard drives: like those in your computers, they will make your website roll out fast!
• GZIP compression: to compress your website and serve it quickly.
• Cache systems: there are companies that have good cache systems. This feature greatly improves the loading speed.

4.2 Images

This is a mistake that we all go through when started working with website design and posts. You start writing posts or pages and start uploading High Definition images. They are not optimized and they are very heavy.

As a result, months or years later, you will start worrying about why your visits do not increase.

That is why it is extremely important that you optimize the images on your website.

4.3 The Plugins

WordPress plugins are great to add any functionality to the web. You can add some share buttons, a contact form and things like that in a couple of clicks.

The problem is, when those plugins start eating the resources of the web, it slows that down.

The idea is to keep the minimum number of plugins on the web. However, be aware that sometimes the number does not affect performance directly. You can have few plugins but all of them are heavy plugins.

Therefore, try to analyze your plugin’s size and its impact on loading performance. It is recommended that you use a good WordPress Hosting provider to host your WordPress site fast and lag-free.

4.4 The Template

Because WordPress is used more every day, there are more developers who create templates. There are even specialized theme stores such as Themeforest, StudioPress and the like.

The problem here is that not all templates are equally optimized. Many developers do not strive to create templates that are fast.

There are some themes who have hundreds of functions that load many scripts. Of course, it makes your website very heavy.

Look for templates that give you good support. Otherwise, you will have problems in the long run.

#5. External Scripts

One of the most common failures that slow down a website is external scripts.

Let me provide you with a few examples:

• Advertising: advertising such as AdSense is a true resource annihilator. Its system makes hundreds of external calls to display personalized ads to users.
• Social networks: from the typical Facebook or Twitter box, show Instagram photos and things like that.

These are the most common, although I have found that using good hosting service is still the most important thing to speed up your website. If you have no idea about this, you can check out HostingRaja. So, have you measured how long your website takes? Let me know with your comments below!