In today’s competitive digital world, no business wants to stand behind in the line because of a slow website. There comes the need of speeding up your wordpress website not only for desktop but also for mobile devices.
Google and other search engines majorly focus on mobile page speed more than the desktop version of a web page. If you are scoring less in the mobile tests, you have a chance to do mobile optimizations.
Since mobile users are impatient in waiting too long for a slow web page loading, they choose to press the back button. This could possibly end up very badly, resulting in a higher bounce rate. On the other hand, a fast-loading WordPress site tends to have more growth opportunities with higher conversions, sales, and traffic.
Therefore, it’s better to take Page Speed Insights seriously at first sight before it’s too late. All you need to do is take care of your core web vitals with a handful of practices that we are going to show you here in this guide.
No matter which industry you belong to, you will be able to increase your mobile WordPress speed using the information in this guide.
Identify Your Pain Points of a Slow WordPress Site by Testing
Before taking any measures, you need to know how your site is having slow speed. There are lots of reasons why your site is slow, including hosting, caching, plugins, themes, and more.
To get a full detailed report of your website, you can use several testing tools, here are just a few:
- Google Page Speed Insights
- GTmetrix
- Pingdom
Now, once you know where your problem is lying, take a look at the effective ways to get a good PSI score.
8 Techniques to Boost Your WordPress Site on Mobile
Boosting your wordpress site to get a good mobile speed score can be a daunting task, with lots of strategies you can find out there. What works for desktop sometimes doesn’t work for mobile.
So, you might be looking for mobile-specific speed solutions to score better on fast internet connections as well as slower connections. Here, we have picked the top 8 techniques to boost your wordpress site both on mobile and desktop.
1. Use Faster Web Hosting
Web hosting is the foundation of any website. It offers the required facilities to handle and maintain a wordpress site. So, if you will leave your base weak, you’ll most likely drop in the entire process.
First off, you should use a faster web hosting service. There is no doubt VPS or dedicated hosting performs faster than shared hosting. Still, we see many businesses using cheaper shared hosting servers and end up wondering why their site is slow. It is simply because their website is sharing the same server with other sites. In case, if one of the sites has more traffic, other websites can end up having slow speed on the same server.
Therefore, most of the time, we recommend our clients use Bluehost for managed WordPress hosting services. Managed wordpress hosting by Bluehost comes with quality features to improve your performance and security in the long run.
Dedicated hosting is fine-tuned for extreme speed, 24/7 support, powerful configurations, and much more. Bluehost provides many choices to select either Standard, Enhanced, or Premium Plan. Latter ones will offer you extra features like more storage space, more bandwidth, etc.
So, simply moving your site to a better host can have a great impact on speed.
2. Optimize Website Images
Image optimization plays a huge role in reducing WordPress site loading time. Optimizing images involves resizing and compressing files so that they can be loaded more quickly.
It’s better to go with JPEG image formats than PNG or GIF. JPEG images load much faster than others.
Sometimes even changing the file type can reduce the size of a web page which results in improving mobile page speed on wordpress. For instance, the WebP image format has proven results in increased speed and performance of a site.
To get WebP support to optimize web images for speed, you can use wordpress plugins like W3speedster, a professional wordpress speed optimizer.
It will help you boost page speed with easy image optimization techniques without sacrificing the quality including WebP conversions, lazy loading, and much more.
3. Use Fast CDN
Another great way to improve your wordpress speed is using a fast CDN. Content Delivery Networks or CDNs are designed to serve site content faster by caching it and distributing it from multiple geographic locations.
The greater the distance between user and server, the more will be the delay in rendering content. What CDN does is that it connect your website to worldwide servers. This can shave seconds off your site load time.
A CDN can help your images and other assets to transfer on the cloud. It also provides other advantages, such as added security using HTTP/2, even if your host doesn’t support it. You can have high security against malicious attacks, hacking & breaches.
Cloudflare is one of the top CDN service providers with a fast, agile, and secured global network. It can help your WordPress load faster and even more, will DDoS Protection.
4. Use Caching Plugin
Using caching plugin can be a great way to improve your mobile page speed on wordpress. Caching is closely related to the speed of a site as it can reduce several seconds of your page load time.
One and the best way to get server caching of your site is by using managed wordpress hosting. However, in case, you don’t have that, you can use a fast-caching plugin to help you with the increasing speed of your site.
Site caching and server caching, both are different things. With caching server, your website stores web pages and other site content. By placing previously requested information in temporary storage, a cache server reduces bandwidth and page load time.
Cache Plugins also provide a feature of mobile caching. If most of your traffic comes from mobile, you can choose to preload mobile cache instead of desktop.
5. Use Fastest WordPress Plugins and Themes
If you are handling a high-traffic wordpress site, then using the fastest plugins and themes can be your best bet to get a higher speed and performance of a site.
Where fastest wordpress themes such as GeneratePress, Astra, NEVE offer customization features optimized for speed, a few of the best wordpress plugins can help you grow your business.
These themes and plugins use less storage space, having smaller in size, and are not dependent on jQuery.
So, if you are looking for optimizing plugins and themes, consider using fast options that are easy to start with.
6. Optimize Javascript and CSS Files
Optimizing JS and CSS files is probably the best way to optimize your wordpress site for faster loading and speed.
If you have tested your site with one of the recommended tools, you might have come with a minification of Javascript/CSS files warning.
From eliminating render-blocking resources to removing unused CSS, you are ensuring speed optimization.
Many plugins load their scripts and styles in the background. Contact form plugin like Contact form 7 creates offscreen loading not only on the content page but also on several other essential pages including the homepage.
7. Improve Core Web Vitals
By improving the health of your core web vitals – CLS, LCP, FID, you can improve mobile page speed on wordpress.
Open your mobile core web vitals report and check out the areas of improvement. If it is showing a bad score, then you need to make sure to improve your site core web vitals, and you’ll see a huge increment in the page loading and response time.
Moreover, FCP is another important factor that needs to be taken care of to speed your wordpress site. First contentful paint doesn’t count in the core web vital but improving FCP will give you better site speed performance.
8. Reduce Page Weight
A lighter web page is usually quicker to load on mobile. Reducing page weight will help you to avoid network payload on google page speed insights. A heavy page generally caused by heavy media files, scripts and fonts.
With Gzip compression, image optimization and minifying codes are a few of the best ways to reduce the weight of the files. After optimization, it will come around 0.5 to 1 mb page size.
These are the best tips for increasing mobile speed.
Thank you so much for this post seriously!
For caching solution I think lscache caching plugin works best and with litespeed webserver it drastically improve wp site speed.