WordPress speed is my most recent dilemma. Somehow all coding and programming behind WordPress’ seemingly easy to use content management system loaded web sites makes it agonizingly slow. In particular I’m bothered by my online shop www.littlesharks.ca
If you trust the rule that websites retain the visitor’s attention only up to 3-4 seconds, whoever visits Little Sharks would have to have the patience of an angel to wait for it to load and I don’t think too many people like that. I’m so close into getting into involuntary online traffic/road rage, and who knows, maybe there were cases of people hitting their keyboard in distress and clicking away? No death treats have followed through as of yet, so maybe I’m good. Or maybe low sales are the same thing like death…?
To address this quite serious problem, I’ve run a google speed test to get some facts and suggestions on how to improve the loading time.
So these numbers below are what I’ve got with all the suggested fixes done. As you can see from the image below, I minified Java Script and have no redirects present. Still, the score is not the best.
For comparison I’ve added stats about the CNN website that I’m sure uses some sort of content management system as well. I am behind, but not by much.
I’ve used the help of a cache plugin called WP Rocket, that helped me to minify CSS, Html and JQuery scripts. I’ve also optimized home page images.
Since the loading time still didn’t improve that much, I’ve added a loading bar, which is supposed to load first before anything else and I have added this sentence to it:
GREAT THINGS ARE WORTH WAITING FOR
Because honestly, I’ve run out of ideas for now and a little bit of humor always helps. Besides, it’s the truth whether you like it or not. 😉
Will this be enough of a fix for now? Until I manage to figure something out, sure.
Screenshot of my loading bar:
Would I recommend a WordPress website for your business? For now, I’d advise that you please stay away. The hand-coding of a website takes more time but there’s more control over it as well as allowing you the competitive speed over your friendly business rivals. Unless you are in need of a content management system for your business, it’s better to spend a couple of extra bucks on monthly article updates and have them done by your web designer rather than sacrificing the loading time.
Have a good day, people! Let me know if you have any better ideas for improving WordPress’ website speed.