If you are working on wordpress and your blog is not ranking on google , then you need to worry about it. Today wordpress has a market share of more than 35% . So to distinguish yourself out there you need speed optimizations.
To Speed up wordpress website , it can be a little bit tricker. But If followed in right way it can give really fruitful results . We have analysed around 500 websites . Then we have pinpointed the most important factor responsible for high load times and slow wordpress website speed.
90% of the time image optimization is where the fault lies, rectifying which will speed up wordpress website. There are many websites where we needs only 200px of images. Image will be of no use if it is greater than screen size. Still people uses 3000px of images of approx 5 mb for a general screen size of 1080px. Now let’s make calculation for this single image. Imagine if that image loads for 10000 times or by 10000 visitors. This much traffic is not high trust me. You may see how much extra load will it put on your server / hosting. Every time a website will be opened it will put 4.9 mb of extra bandwidth. Extra bandwidth means extra server load.
Now For 10000 visitors it will be 4.9 * 10000 = 49000 mb. 49000 mb turns out to be 49 GB’s of extra bandwidth and server load just for an image.
Now just imagine having 5 – 10 images of the same ratio. Moreover it will also cause the domino effect on your server as loading one image will take time. If the second visitor comes at the same time on the same page he will face more loading time. As your server is being busy in serving the first visitor every new visitor will increase more load than. Performing a load testing can tell you how many concurrent visitors can be handled by the server or hosting. However performing a load test can be a complicated task for a normal person , we at SKJCORP can help you out. On the user side if you see an extra 4.9 mb image can take upto 1 second on 50mbps connection. You can see image below the average speed available in top countries
But again , it will still take 1 second even with top speeds. 70-80% of the audiences of developing countries has only 2G Speed of 384kbps.Google also prioritising mobile first pages for indexing. Imagine if someone read on mobile with low internet speed access they will feed up. I bet if blog has large images, user will close the page instead of reading it. The average time waiting time is only 4 sec. In that time they made decision to read or leave. There are many plugins on wordpress for image compression. WebP format is best for speed optimizations. I use ShortPixel which is free plugin for upto 100 images per month. It automatically compresses the image in best quality resulting increase in page speed.
Png to jpg conversion
Using a png to jpg conversion tool would help a great , as png is meant for very high quality image formatting technique, so even if you compress png, the size would not decrease that much, so first converting the image from png to jpg will save a lot of size , without having a noticeable visual impact on the image and size can be reduced by even 90% in some cases. I use this free png2jpg tool , it is very handy and help you speeding up your wordpress website
For background images very high resolution images are not necessary , Images can be from medium to low quality. Image will load into the background, so why to waste resources. Even for the full retina displays background images upto 1200 px resolutions in jpg format will work fine.
Add lazy loading into images
Let me make you understand what it is and how it can help. Lazy loading is basically a technique , in which images are loaded in background or when the request is being made to them. What does that mean is it will not block the page content (text , styles , html , js) to be loaded instead image loading will be made in separate calls to server that too on a background thread , without blocking the user interface of the website . Consider it as getting images when required not just at the starting of page load in simple terms .
The task can be done by yourself also by placing a simple script, but there are free plugins out there to help . I use free a3lazyload plugin for the task which will apply lazy load to all the images inside a website , which will drastically speed up wordpress website
Your Images being Used by other sites by linking :- It can be a good factor as well as bad factor .
If your website gets crawled a lot because you generally creates good quality images or illustrations on your website. There are lot of chances that other sites are using your images directly from your image link , i.e images on their website will be served by your server instead of theirs . However there is a way to prevent it but before that let us see the Good factor.
Good factor is that you will get the free backlinks from the website which are using your images directly by linking, which can boost up your website ranking in search engines. Imagine a famous blog or reputed news site uses your image , there you get the free quality backlink and here your Domain authority and Site Ranking Improves drastically .
Coming back to blocking the image access for other websites , putting the following script under your .htaccess file will work for that .
#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?skjcorp.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
We at SKJCORP can help you make any website from scratch and redesign your website with keeping performance and SEO in mind to achieve the best result , If you have any project for us feel free to contact here. We will be happy to help you out.
