A well-optimized WordPress website has become a must-have in today’s world. But it’s not only a matter of convenience — your load time can have a serious impact on your site’s overall performance.
Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, and the slower your website is, the lower it will likely appear in search engine results. Additionally, Core Web Vitals is understood to be another element on which your website is ranked.
As such, website speed optimization is critically important for reaching new visitors. Fortunately, you can speed up your WordPress website with our Speed Optimization service.
By how much? Let’s take a look!
How we sped up over 70 sites from 35% to 234%
For each of our client websites, our WordPress engineers use GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed insights to audit overall health and identify any performance gaps on the site.
To boost performance numbers as high as possible, we initiate a thorough optimization sweep which, depending on the audit, can result in conducting up to 40 optimization tasks. These often include:
- Optimize Images
- Reduce Server Response Time
- Inline JS and CSS for small file
- Preload for Google fonts and local fonts
- Minify Javascript and CSS
- Leverage Browser Caching
- Enable Compression
- Cleanup HTML
- Lazy Loading Images
- Load Critical CSS
- Defer JS
- Generate WebP Caching
- Activate CDN Support
- Fixing broken links
- Remove unused plugins
How much we can increase performance scores depends on multiple factors, like the size of the pages and how well optimized the client’s website was before the job.
Through 70 performance optimizations, we’ve improved PageSpeed scores by up to 234% on the high end. We’ve also improved GTmetrix scores by two letters (C to A) on average.
What we learned
We can get your site to score an A with GTmetrix
GTmetrix is the more advanced tool of the two that our engineers use. It pulls results from a variety of sources to generate scores and recommendations.
Here are our client GTMetrix averages after optimization:
- Performance Grade = A
- Performance Score = 89.5
- Structure Score = 92.0
- Largest Contentful Paint = 1.1 secs
With these averages over a large sample, we are confident that new clients can achieve an A Performance Grade after our optimization service.
We can get your site to score a minimum of 80 to up to 90+ with Google PageSpeed
While not as advanced as GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed still offers a valuable snapshot of the overall health of a website. On average, we earned a score of 83.4 after optimization, and on 33 occasions, we scored over 90.
With a score of at least 80, clients can be assured that their site is performing well beyond industry standards.
In extreme cases, the best path to improving your site score vitals is to rebuild it from scratch
While our service will improve site scores in all cases, there are times when we are prevented from bumping up scores to healthy levels. This can be because the site is critically unorganized and cluttered, often due to years of neglect.
In these extreme cases, it’s recommended to rebuild the website entirely to bring it up to standard and industry best practices.
Conclusion
Over time a website can get slow due to new scripts, multimedia content, plugins additions, and edits of any kind. If your website is slow, sluggish, and taking ages to fully load, there’s a serious risk that your business is not only losing visitors but also ranking on search engine results.
Not sure where your site stands? Our WordPress experts can help with our free website performance review.
