As many people know, speed is a Google ranking factor. This has been stated by Google and will become more prominent after the core web vitals and page experience updates.
Google wants your pages to load fast for their users, especially in the mobile-first era. With over 50% of all Google’s traffic on mobile, the majority of users are using 3G/4G.
Faster loading pages can increase your website’s revenue. This does not only relate to SEO and organic traffic, you will see higher conversion rates from your paid traffic if your landing pages load faster.
If you want to try and speed up your load times yourself, look at image optimization and caching plugins. These will shave some time off your speed and are usually the main culprits. Sites like TinyPNG can compress images by over 75%, significantly reducing your overall page size.
If you run a website earning significant revenue, it’s time to call in a WordPress Speed Optimization Expert. These guys go way beyond just installing a couple of plugins and will be aiming to get your pages to load in milliseconds.
Webpage speed optimization experts will likely be dev-based, optimizing for speed at the server level – obviously, you need good quality, fast hosting to start with.
Recommended WordPress Speed Optimization Services
I have used both of these WordPress optimization services on by affiliate sites, both services got my speeds down to under 1 second. The affiliate link CTR increased from 23% to 44% on one site, without changing the content. People trust fast loading pages and don’t leave before they are fully loaded.
WP Speed Fix
WP Speed Fix are well know in the industry and offer a good range of services from quick done for you fixes through to full-on training of your dev team in WordPress speed optimization. With WPSPeedfix’s top business service, they will also migrate your site over to VPS hosting.
WP Speed Fix begin by doing a full speed audit on your site to diagnose the main problems causing the page speed to be poor. They usually find 4-5 main problems that need to to fixed. Note – you will need to give these guys full access to your WordPress backend and your Cpanel for them to find the problems and fix them.
WP Speed Fix advise a TAT of 3-5 business days turnaround, once they have your details but can be sooner (they actually did one of my sites in under 24hrs).
WP Speed Fix can also work on WordPress Multisite and Woocommerce speed problems.
WP Speed Fix offer a 100% money back guarantee if they don’t speed up your website and fix the speed problems. This is the best rated WordPress speed service throughout the industry.
WP Speed Guru
WP speed Guru offers another quality WordPress speed optimization service. WP Speed Guru’s service starts at US$199 if your site is not too large. You also have the option of watching them work on your site via Skype so you can learn what they are doing for future reference.
WP Speed Guru also offers a Skype speed consulting service. This is great if you are pretty good with optimizing websites for speed, but looking for a second opinion. I used this service after doing everything possible to try and get a site under 1 second load time, but seemed stuck. These guys look at sites every single day, so can quickly diagnose problems you may have missed.
How to Test your Website’s Speed
If you are looking to see how fast your website is loading, try the following tools:
These three tools are likely to give you all different results. It’s best to look at the data from all three if you want to diagnose your speed problems yourself.
Recommended Speed Optimization Plugins for WordPress
Here are some of the plugins I tend to use time and time again on my sites.
WP Fastest Cache – Caching plugin with a pro option
WP Smush – Image compression plugin
BJ Lazy Load – This plugin stops your entire page loading with all the images and loads them as users scroll down
This website is currently running on Siteground with their new Optimizer plugin, which I really love.