- Portent ran a study
that looked at just over 94 million pages
across 10 e-commerce sites.
They found a website conversions dropped
by an average of 4.42%
with each additional second of load time
between zero and five seconds.
That's huge.
You can lose money by just having poor load time.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel
and today I'm going to break down
how to speed up your WordPress website in just five steps.
(upbeat music)
Before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel
and if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
Question for you, how long does your website take to load?
If you don't know, put it into neilpatel.com/seo-analyzer,
put in your URL and it'll show you
how long your website takes to load.
I'm going to be focused on speed,
but if you want to optimize your WordPress site for SEO,
I have another video
that walks you through the perfect SEO setup for WordPress
with the eight best plugins that you can use.
The first thing that you want to do
is check your WordPress site speed.
That's pretty much easy.
You can use Ubersuggest to do that, right?
You just go to the neilpatel.com/seo-analyzer URL,
seo-analyzer, which you can see on the screen here,
go to that, put in your URL.
It'll tell you how long your webpage takes to load.
And it even tells you what to do to fix it.
You should aim for load time of less than three seconds.
Here's some things that'll slow down your WordPress site.
Web hosting, when your web hosting server
is not properly configured, it can hurt your website.
You want to make sure your host is also fast.
Your WordPress configuration,
if your WordPress configuration is not serving cast pages,
that means a page has to load up all over again
even as the same page
a hundred other people viewed earlier that day,
it can slow down your website
or make your website crash entirely.
Usually not with a hundred visitors,
but if it was a million,
definitely going to increase some issues.
Page size, mainly images that aren't optimized for the web.
The bigger the images, the longer they take the load.
Now you can compress the image.
I'm not talking about the size and shrink it down
because bigger images tend to do well
and people like bigger images,
but I'm talking about the file size,
compress that down while maintaining the quality.
Bad plugins, if you're using poorly coded plugins,
then you're going to see a slow down in your site
especially if you have one too many plugins.
I see some people's WordPresses and I log in, I'm like,
"Holy crap, this is like NASCAR, literally."
They have so many plugins.
It can fill a NASCAR or Formula One car with them.
And people was like, "Wow, that's one too many plugins."
It is, because a lot of them do the same thing
over and over again.
Another thing to look at is external scripts.
How many of you have external scripts
on your WordPress site?
Leave a comment below with the scripts that you have.
I'll give you one, you probably use Google Analytics,
but leave a comment below
with the rest of the scripts you use.
You probably don't need more than a handful.
The second thing that you'll want to do
is install some kind of cache plugin.
We talked about this a little bit earlier,
but if you don't use caching,
every time someone goes to your website,
WordPress needs to then generate that page dynamically
all over again.
Don't do that to your server.
Be kind and nice to your server.
When you start getting lots of website visitors,
it'll save time, it won't overload your servers as much
and people will have a much better experience.
That means your WordPress system
won't need to work as heavily.
This can make your website load anywhere from two
to five times faster.
That's a lot.
And if you want a free plugin, that does pretty well
use WP Super Cache.
The third thing you need to do is optimize your images.
Images and video content are really heavy,
especially on mobile devices.
Think about it, just because you have a 5G phone
doesn't mean you have 5G reception.
So compress them.
And I'm all to release a WordPress plugin with Ubersuggest
that does this all for you automatically
so you don't even have to do it.
If you want early access to it
just let me know in the comments below.
The fourth thing and it's almost mandatory is use a CDN.
A CDN is a content delivery network.
Just thinking about the Neil Patel website,
it's hosted in the United States,
but did you know that if you pull up my website from India,
it actually gets pulled up from a site that's in India
or a server more so that's in India.
That's a CDN.
That's a content delivery network.
It's taking my files from my site,
even though they're hosted in United States
and putting them in servers all over the world.
That way, if you're coming from India, Brazil, Italy,
it's pinging the closest server to pull up that data.
And you can use tools like CloudFlare for this.
And a lot of the hosts that you use also offer CDNs.
And the last one for you is lazy loading.
Think about this,
if you have long content, let's say 5,000 or 10,000 words,
you don't want to have to load the whole page
before someone can read the content.
You want to load section by section as quick as possible
so people can start reading it as they're reading,
more information gets loaded up.
And that's what's cool about lazy loading.
And I found that in regions that don't have
the best internet connection,
when we started using lazy loading for our visitors,
that way people can get access to the content faster.
It decreased our bounce rates
in these countries that didn't have
the best internet connection by around 6%.
That's huge.
6% by just using lazy loading plugin.
If you need help speeding up your site, optimizing for SEO,
check out my ad agency, NP digital.
If you have any questions, concerns, comments,
leave a comment below.
I'm here to help.
If you enjoy the video like it, share it,
tell people about it.
Thank you for watching.