The increasing slowness of web pages is one of the problems that the team of IndianWebs we confront each other more often. Our customers perceive that something is wrong, that waiting times are too long, a fact that is clearly worrying. For this reason, our office in the iconic Plaza Lesseps in Barcelona it is specializing in gaining speed on our clients' pages. Why are websites getting slower and slower?
To analyze more precisely everything related to speed on a website, we have chatted with Jonathan rosa "The poor functioning of the pages is mainly due to the installation of many plugins. Added to this is that our clients do not know basic tools to optimize. Some simple measurement that any user can carry out would be reduce the weight of excessively large and heavy images o do not upload videos directly to WordPress”, He explains.
The intervention of IndianWebs, key to optimizing your page
Naturally, to take more specific measures that require more advanced knowledge, the help of our experts is needed. But before carrying out any action, it is essential to find a good diagnosis. Therefore, the first thing we do with a page is scan it with tools like GTmetrix o Pingdom Tools. These applications carry out a very fast analysis of our web pages. By copying our URL into their portals, they give us a grade that ranges from A, if the speed is excellent, to F, if it is very poor. In addition, they offer different solutions and advice based on that analysis.
The WPO, basis for the positioning of our website
After the diagnosis, a key element enters the scene. Its about WPO, a concept that comes from the English acronym Web Performance Optimizations, ie the Optimizing the performance of a website so that it loads as quickly as possible. This factor is absolutely fundamental. As Jonathan recalls, “We must always keep in mind that a website or blog with a beautiful design but poor optimization is useless.".
Therefore, The WPO is one of our great allies. It is in charge of analyze and propose changes to optimize the loading speed of a website and reduce the time in which users can fully view it. This greatly improves your browsing experience, which translates into an increase in profits for the company.
The WPO also consists of a good structured content, clean and tidy codea good internal linking policy And a long etcetera. But if we put the focus back on loading speed, we must take into account the images, the amount of content, minified code, a good server, gzip compression, a correctly specified cache and a CDN.
And what is a CDN?
Well, it is a type of IT infrastructure in which several computers geographically distributed in different data centers are intertwined. These store some of the information and content of the websites and will serve them to the end user.
Its advantages are improving server availability (uptime), The traffic load relief of this, the provision of one more security barrier against computer attacks and, logically, the improved performance and loading times. This is because the CDN stores some of the information and content that users request. Thus, there will be copies available distributed in various parts of the planet.
The end user will be served from the copy that is physically closest to them. Jonathan rosa states that “this is especially useful for websites that receive traffic from different geographic areas. For example, if in addition to the European market you go to the Latin American market, a CDN can greatly improve website performance".
WP Super Cache, our recommended plugin for WordPress
A slow website can make you go down a lot in Google rankings. But also, if a user enters a website that takes a long time to load, they will press the "Back" button and we will see how they run to another page. But that's over now. Next, we teach you the best plugin for your WordPress in our opinion.
Continuing with Jonathan's explanations, “first, you must keep in mind that when someone accesses your WordPress website, a large number of requests are made to the servers where it is hosted. This is to load the CSS, images and Javascript files, in addition to the database queries to obtain the content of each page,” he comments. " That's why caching plugins are very important, since they generate static HTML pages so that we do not have to make that large number of queries to the database and the server where we have our website hosted. This drastically reduces its loading speed", Add.
In this case, WP Super Cache It is a relatively simple and ideal plugin to perform the function we are looking for. For those who do not have very advanced knowledge about the use of this type of tools, it will be quite easy to understand. The first step to get it up and running is to download it from the plugin repository, and once done, activate it. Once it is up and running, it will notify you that the cache is not enabled, so you need to configure it.
Once done, head over to Settings> WP Super Cache. There you will see several tabs that you can use to configure the plugin. With this, your page will start working like never before!
