1- Get faster Hosting for your WordPress Speed
The quickest and most effective way to increase your WordPress Speed is to switch to a faster hosting provider. The right host can make a dramatic difference in the speed of your website.
If you’re hosting your site with a cheap hosting provider. It’s likely to be sharing resources with thousands of other sites. This can cause your website to run slowly since you have to compete for server resources.
Upgrading to a faster host may cost you a bit more in the short run. But it will be worth it in the long run. It directly affects the LCP, TTFB, and FCP and will improve your overall Core Web Vital Score.
Your website will benefit from improved Uptime and Reliability, which are critical for any site that generates revenue and leads. Visitors can’t sign up or purchase if your site is down, and search engines have been known to demote sites with unstable and poor uptime.
2- Page Size is Everything (page speed)
The size of your web pages is critical to how quickly they load. The speed at which a page load is proportional to page’s weight, which is, in turn, proportional to its size.
WordPress is a great platform for beginners and seasoned developers alike, but it comes with many bloats. Over time, your site will get even more bloated as you add more and more plugins, themes, images, and videos.
This is especially true if your site suffers from any of the following:
- Outdated Plugins– A plugin that its developers are no longer updating is a ticking time bomb for your website. These plugins can have security vulnerabilities that are not fixed and can cause your site to crash or, worse, be hacked.
- Unused Themes- If you’re not using a theme, delete it. Themes take up unnecessary space and leave behind a ton of bloat from demo images, CSS files, and scripts.
- Uncompressed Images-Images can be compressed without any noticeable quality loss. Compressing your images will reduce the file size and the overall size of the page.
- Not Lazy-Loading Videos and Images, If you implement lazy-loading for your videos and images. It will only load them when they are visible on the screen. This will reduce the number of bytes to be loaded on the initial page load.
3- Data and user experience
Contrary to what some believe, Google wants your site to be successful! They provide many tools that will help you improve your site experience and ultimately increase your rankings. One of those tools is the Chrome User Experience Report.
The report provides a wealth of data that can be used to identify common problems with WordPress Speed. You can use this data to see where you have areas of improvement and the areas you are excelling in.
Although the improvements you make to your site will be reflected in the report. It will take some time to collect and analyze the data. So, don’t expect instantaneous results.
On average, Core Web Vitals updates every 28-30 days, so you will need to be patient while waiting for your score to reflect the changes.
Regardless of the changes you make, if you skip the previous two recommendations, get a Fast Host and Reduce Page Size, all of your efforts will be wasted!
4- Use a CDN to increase WordPress Speed
Another improvement any site owner should implement to improve their Core Web Vitals is to use a CDN.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is an online platform that stores resources on multiple servers across the globe to be delivered to users from the server closest to them. This helps improve the speed at which your site loads for people worldwide.
The most popular CDNs are Cloudflare and WP Rocket.
- Cloudflare, Cloudflare is a CDN that secures, speeds up, and improves your website’s performance. It acts as a reverse proxy, where all traffic passes through the Cloudflare network before hitting your server. The benefits of this include caching static content, reducing HTML document size by removing unnecessary data from HTML pages, and using various security protocols to block common attacks.
- WP Rocket, WP Rocket is a CDN plugin that increases your WordPress Speed. By reducing page load times and caching static resources like CSS and JavaScript files and compressing HTML, JPEG, and PNG images. WP Rocket also includes various optimizations for WordPress users, such as blocking requests to known bad bots and crawlers.
Final Thoughts
Remember, Core Web Vitals is all about making sure your site runs its best. Not just for the search engines but also for your visitors. As with most SEO changes, the impact of these may not be seen immediately, but over time, as you make the necessary changes, you will see an improvement in your overall score.
Now that you understand the basics of Core Web Vitals. It’s time to put them into practice and start making your site faster and more user-friendly!
By following the recommendations in this article. You will be well on your way to improving your Core Web Vitals score and your site’s overall speed and performance.
