Slow WordPress Website?
WordPress performance getting you down? Is your slow WooCommerce website preventing your customers from purchasing? Site speed and Core Web Vitals performance are increasingly important: affecting conversions, search engine traffic and sales.
We’re specialists in optimisting WordPress and WooCommerce websites; let us deliver rapid results for your website.
Why is optimising my website speed important?
The speed of your website – that is, how quickly it loads and responds to user input – is important because it impacts conversions, search engine traffic and sales.
In 2010, Google announced that it was going to start using site speed as a ranking signal.
In 2020, Google announced its new “Core Web Vitals” metrics to take this one step further. These metrics are made up of three components: content loading speed, interactivity and visual stability. The aim of the Core Web Vitals initiative is to provide guidance to webmasters and developers for ‘quality signals’ that it believes are important to delivering the best possible user experience for customers.
Beyond that, site speed affects your customer’s perception of your website and impacts the likelihood that they will stay on your website.
Why should I optimise WordPress?
Optimising your WordPress website to meet the base requirements as specified in Google’s Core Web Vitals guidelines ensures that your website is:
1
Performant – fast to load, even on mobile devices browsing the web using cellular data
2
Receptive to input – able to take instructions straight away
3
Not distracting or jumpy – reducing visual movement and layout shift to prevent customers from losing their place
How do you optimise WordPress’ performance?
Going beyond simply resizing a few images (a short term fix), Ultimately Better Ltd know how to set up, configure and tweak WordPress core and hundreds of popular plugins to get the best out of your setup. From server configuration to static file generation, caching and coding: we’ve got you covered when it comes to WordPress speed and performance.
Ultimately Better, led by performance specialist Jem Turner, can help you audit and optimise your WordPress website to improve reported scores across all three facets of the recommended Core Web Vitals guidelines, as well as deep dives on WordPress core and plugin perfomance.
If you’d like to book a performance audit and optimisation plan, get in touch:
Further reading
Alternatively, you may be interested in reading some of Jem’s published work on WordPress performance:
- Read Jem’s Guide to WordPress Website Performance Auditing and Optimisation
- Read Jem Turner’s research on the five most common reasons why WordPress websites have performance issues.
- Check out Jem Turner’s 10 optimisations for a faster WordPress website
Book a performance audit
Fill out your details below to book a performance audit and optimisation plan with our development team.
Performance optimisation FAQ
I am running X plugins, does this mean my site will always be slow?
Sites with lots of plugins are not slow by default. In fact, the number of plugins doesn’t correlate with site speed at all, although it is often the case that badly developed websites have more plugins handling things that plugins shouldn’t be handling!
I’m running WooCommerce, I’ve heard that’s harder to optimise?
Ultimately Better have extensive experience optimising WooCommerce shops of all sizes; it’s no harder to optimise than any other website!
Why should I get you to optimise my WordPress website when I can just install a plugin to do it for me?
You can just install a plugin to do it for you, and you may see some improvements – but as with most generic plugins, it’s not going to be able to give you solutions to match your exact setup with your exact requirements (and sometimes might make things worse!)
Our WordPress performance solutions aren’t just an off the shelf plugin, we specifically tailor all our optimisations to each website.
How much does a performance audit and optimisation cost?
Our WordPress performance audits start at £350 + VAT. Once we have completed the audit, we will provide a written optimisation report with our recommendations for improving site speed, in priority order, including costs to complete the necessary actions if you wish to proceed.