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This is a guest post. Opinions and recommendations are the author’s own and not necessarily those of WP Rocket.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi… six Mississippi. Nope, I am out of here. I have no patience for slow sites. Honestly, if it takes me more than five seconds to load a page, I’ll stop browsing it, and move on to another website.
Whether it’s information that we are looking for, products that we want to buy or services that we want to use, we want to be able to access it as quickly as possible from the mobile and from the desktop.
Speed is everything. We need it. We want it. Elementor delivers it.
The Importance of Speed
My whining may seem like good material for the “First World Problems” meme, but I am not alone.
Loading time is a major contributing factor to page abandonment. Over 50% of users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. 52% of online shoppers state that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty. 44% of online shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience online. On top of that, page speed is a ranking factor for Google.
Speed is extremely important in today’s world, and all efforts should be put into delivering it.
Adverse Factors?
In our magazine, we’ve recently discussed how to optimize and speed up your WordPress website. We know that speed is important, but what affects it? Here are some of the major factors that affect the speed of webpages.
Web Hosting Provider
A web hosting provider for your websites is one of the major factors that affect your speed. When it’s not properly configured, it can hurt your website. Most people use shared hosting because of cheap prices and the liberal of use of the term “unlimited”.
Shared hosting is when you share the same server with numerous other websites, some of which could be using exceptionally large resources. Shared hosting is bad because it fails to deliver good loading times on peak traffic hours. There are also frequent down times during peak hours and you can never know how well the servers are optimized.
Themes
WordPress themes have lots of dynamic elements like widgets, icons and more. They may be appealing to the eye, but most users aren’t going to use or need them. These elements make the page size bigger, and bigger sizes will make loading your webpage much slower. It’s best to stick to simple themes and forgo the bloated features if you want better speed.
Furthermore, the more elaborate the theme is, the more chances are that the code will be badly written, and a badly written code will certainly hinder the loading speed of your pages.
Image Sizes
You want to keep good quality images. People like pictures. According to a recent study, 32% of marketers believe that visual images are the most important form of content. If your images aren’t optimized, however, they could be slowing you down. Lots of large images are one of the major reasons for a slower webpage.
Dynamic Pages
If you are using WordPress, then you should know that your pages are “dynamic”. This means that every time someone visits your page, the page is built anew, so to speak.
More specifically, whenever someone visits your “dynamic” page, the “behind the scenes” process involves fetching the required information from the server, putting it all back together, and displaying it to the user. This happens every time.
This process involves a lot of steps and if many people visit the same page at once, it can and will overload your server, causing your website to slow down or crash. Other factors, like the amount of information and the location of the servers, also slow down the loading speed of your pages.
Plugins
Sometimes plugins are absolutely necessary, sometimes they are just helpful. Poorly coded plugins, however, will add unnecessary processes which will slow your website down.
On top of that, the more plugins you have, the larger the size of your backup files will become, and when a backup is eventually generated, it will put a heavy strain on the servers.
How Elementor Speeds Things Up
So, now that you’ve learned a little about what factors make your speed slow, let us tell you how Elementor makes things easier for you.
In-House Widgets – No Additional Plugins
Elementor offers dozens of in-built widgets like forms, pop-ups, carousels, etc. potentially replacing dozens of heavy, badly coded plugins. By combining these widgets into one platform, Elementor makes it unnecessary to download and install additional plugins which may make the loading heavy. With fewer assets that do the same thing, the weight is lifted off of the servers, and the loading speed is increased.
A Simple Theme – No Clatter
Recently, Elementor has published its own very simple and fast theme, the Hello Theme, which immediately became a success. Over a period of one month, it has become the 3rd most popular theme on WordPress. The theme features a simple design with no unnecessary clatter.
How to Make Things Even Faster With WP Rocket
“Dynamic” pages, as we’ve mentioned, are a burden on your webpage’s loading speed. That’s why using caching plugins for WordPress is so important, and this is why we recommend WP Rocket.
What Are Caching Plugins?
When a user visits your page for the first time, a caching plugin will take a snapshot of the page and its content and convert it to static, then, when the next person comes to your site, instead of consulting the server for the information, the website provides the snapshot it had taken earlier.
This way, instead of going through the whole process of generating a page, every time a user visits it, a caching plugin makes a copy of the page and serves it to every subsequent user. The time it takes to load a page decreases and visitors get the full page faster.
Some caching plugins are a little limited in terms of providing relevant information, however. The cached information needs to be updated as well, and not all plugins offer such an option. This is why we recommend WP Rocket since it can handle these needs intuitively.
Wrapping Up
Webpage loading speeds are amongst the top priorities for anyone with a website. Every second counts, and should you exceed the acceptable norms (no more than 5-6 seconds), you’ll lose your visitors.
There are numerous factors that affect the loading speed of a webpage, chief amongst are the hosting provider, the chosen theme, image sizes, dynamic pages, and plugins. Elementor can help you reduce some of those factors, while great plugins like WP Rocket can help close the remaining gaps.
