The truth is no one likes a slow loading website. In fact, most users will click off before they wait for your slow website to load. What’s even worst is that even Google uses website speed to rank what sites show up first in Google search results.
A fast loading website is essential for business owners because page loading speed influences everything from traffic to bounce rate to conversions, user experience and, ultimately, profits.
A few months, I finally came to terms that my wordpress website was slow, and I needed to do something about it. So I hopped on GTmetrix to test my assumptions and found it took 13 whole seconds for my website to load.
FYI the recommended and ideal loading time is under 3 seconds.
After doing a quick Google search, I came across a few articles like 17 Ways to decrease load time. There are a lot easy to implement tips like investing in quality hosting to more complex tips, like reducing server requests.
The Easy Way to Speed Up Your WordPress Website
However, for the average business owner, a lot of the tips require more advanced technical knowledge. What I found to be most helpful from my research is the WP Rocket plugin. WP Rocket is a caching and performance optimization plugin. Caching (pronounced as ‘cash-ing') in simple terms is like keeping something that you frequently use close to you.
Caching allows the users' internet browser to have a copy of a website page on hand instead of performing time-consuming functions to load the page to the end-user.
The WP Rocket plugin effortlessly does this for you without needing to have a lot of technical knowledge. In fact, it's one of the easiest caching plugins to use for your site because it requires no configuration.
Out of the box it does the following things for you as soon you click activate;
- Page caching (static HTML file cache)
- Browser caching (on Apache, if available on the server)
- GZIP compression (on Apache, if possible on the server)
- Cross-Origin support for web fonts (on Apache)
- Detection and support of various third-party plugins, themes, and hosting environment
If you really want to take full advantage of the plugin and speed up your wordpress website then you’ll also want to enable the following features;
- Cache preloading – this helps you “build” the cache so that your site is consistently fast.
- Minification/concatenation – this helps shrink and combine your CSS/JS files.
- Remove query strings from static resources
- Lazy loading – this delays images loading as they are scrolling down the page
- Defer JS loading
- Disable emojis/embeds
- Combine Google Fonts files
GTmetrix score prior to installing WP Rocket on karmenk.com
GTmetrix score after installing WP Rocket on karmenk.com
Keep in mind this is before I even enabled all of the features. All of the features listed can easily be handled with a click of a button. Plus WP Rocket does a great job of explaining each feature, so there’s no confusion as to what it does.
Is WP Rocket Really Worth It?
Truthfully, you don’t need WP Rocket to have a faster website. You could just invest the time into individually implementing the things that will make your site faster.
But really – as a business owner is that a good use of your time? I’m probably guessing not, and if you’re like me, then you place more value on your time and convenience.
And that’s why it’s worth it to invest $49 to have WP Rocket do the heavy lifting for you instead of trying to figure it out on your own.
***Disclosure: Keep in mind that some of the links on this page are affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you.
Meet the author
Karmen Kendrick
Since 2016, Karmen Kendrick Creative has been helping women in business design beautiful, memorable branding and websites that align with their goals and attract the right clients.
