Speed Up Your WordPress Landing Page (Beginner-Friendly Guide)

Speed Up Your WordPress Landing Page (Beginner-Friendly Guide)

Last Updated on June 27, 2022

Needless to say, nobody likes a slow website. 

Now, you have your own reasons for seeking to speed up your WordPress landing page.

Maybe, you received feedback about your site’s load time. You could also be interested in maximizing your ad spend, getting more out of your landing page visits, or improving SEO.

Whatever the case might be, you’re on the right track. Cutting down your landing page’s load time is a meaningful website optimization.

If we look at the numbers, KissMetrics learned that a 1-second delay in page response could result in a 7% reduction in conversions. For context, if your e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year!

Let’s go through easy-to-follow tips that will help you optimize your page’s speed…

But First, Run a Test

Before you find solutions, determine where you stand.

You’ll want to check your landing page’s performance. 

Take note that each particular page (within the same site) performs differently. Your homepage could be based on a modern page builder, while a product detail page could contain heavy image files.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of tools for testing your page’s load time. 

You could test your page with a tool like Pingdom. You could pick the location where you’d like to run the test from. As you scroll down, you’ll find specific suggestions to improve your page’s performance.

Alternatively, get the data straight from Google. You could try their PageSpeed Insights tool. It will give you an overall performance score along with other advanced checks. If you’d like to dive deeper, you can also run additional tests using Google’s Test My Site, which is focused on mobile performance. 

These speed tests can be done in a couple of minutes, and the results will help you identify the areas to improve to boost your landing page’s loading time.

Pick a Lightweight WordPress Theme

If you’re creating a new WordPress site, you’ll inevitably need to pick a theme. 

As there’s an endless number of options, it helps to narrow down your theme of choice by spotting those that focus on speed.

Keep in mind that choosing a fast theme doesn’t mean sacrificing features and design. The key is to choose a modern theme that keeps up with the latest technologies. 

Regardless of your business’ industry or aesthetic preferences, there’s a modern theme for you.

If you’re looking for customizable, lightweight, and modern WordPress themes, we highly recommend Blocksy as it’s powerful yet blazing fast.

Use a Third-Party Video Hosting Platform

As you invest in perfecting your landing page, you’ll likely produce a video to go with it. They help tell your story and even support SEO.

However, adding videos tends to affect your page’s performance. Are you supposed to choose between page speed and the use of videos?

Kinsta suggests using a third-party video platform like Wistia, YouTube, or Vimeo to host your video content.

By using popular video hosting platforms, you don’t have to worry about bandwidth restrictions imposed by most web hosting plans. The video platform will also take care of optimizing the video players for efficiency.

Optimize Images

Like using videos, adding large image files will affect your landing page’s speed.

Research indicates that images account for around 21% of a webpage’s overall weight. You’ll definitely want to optimize them.

With editing tools like Photoshop, there is a “Save for Web” option that allows you to optimize its size. 

You could also automate this by using WordPress plugins. For instance, ShortPixel automatically compresses and crops images.

Upgrade Your Web Hosting Plan and Use a CDN

Like picking a WordPress theme, selecting a web hosting provider is one of those inevitable steps.

If your site is still in its early stages, a beginner hosting plan is ok.

However, consider that your landing pages will get more visits as the business grows. You’ll have to look at upgrading your hosting plan at some point.

To add, geography is a factor. If your visitor is halfway around the globe from where your web server is located, they may experience extra latency.

With a CDN (Content Delivery Network), there will be copies of your site around the globe. Your website visitor will load your page from a nearby server. 

If you’re looking to upgrade your hosting service and set up a CDN, consider a premium WordPress hosting platform like Kinsta. They’re known for great support and all of their plans come with access to CDN.

Deactivate Plugins and External Scripts

You install tools in order to get extra features. At some point, you could accumulate unwanted plugins and scripts.

Especially if your site is older, there could have been a phase when you experimented with a bunch of tools that you no longer use.

Go through your list of WordPress plugins. You could learn that half of your active plugins should be retired at this point. Maybe, you have newer tools for the job or some of these products are now deprecated.

Beyond WordPress plugins, you could have scripts from third-party services such as Facebook, Google Adsense, Disqus, Optimizely, Sumo, HelloBar, and much more. These extra services can double your page load times, so you’ll want to take down those that you no longer need.

Try Out a Speed and Optimization Plugin

Speed optimization plugins are supplementary plugins that help you enhance your website’s performance. These plugins usually do this by automatically optimizing images for web, pre-loading caches, or even including a CDN that will help you deliver your website faster to those who visit your website.

There are a handful of plugins that you can use to enhance your website’s performance. Among the widely used (or raved) are WP Rocket, Perfmatters, and Nitropack.

Early this year, our PageSpeed Insights scores were relatively low so we decided to try out Nitropack. Our scores drastically improved (thanks Nitropack!) so we have firsthand experience of how a speed optimization plugin can help improve your website’s performance!

Over to You

While improving your landing page speed looks intimidating, consider the significant difference it will make for your load time.

Try the most straightforward fixes first and run a test to see how well your page will perform.

Seeing the improved speed after each fix will inspire you to keep going as you continue optimizing your landing page.

If you’re using efficient tools such as WordPress’ own Gutenberg editor, you’re already in for a treat. It’s highly efficient compared to legacy page builders, helping your page’s speed.

Looking to design beautiful landing pages without getting slowed down? Make the most out of Gutenberg with Stackable. Download Stackable for free.

Disclaimer: We may earn a commission from the services and tools mentioned above

6 thoughts on “Speed Up Your WordPress Landing Page (Beginner-Friendly Guide)

  1. Thanks for sharing this article. I was shocked to learn how slow my website was loading through google page insights recently. To the naked eye it seemed fine to me, but google was seeing things completely differently. Needless to say I made some changes straight away and have been scoring much better recently.

  2. Except for CDN, it sounds like I’m on the right track already since I use Blocksy (great theme), Stackable and minimal plugins or scripts.

    I was never a fan of page builders and thought I was living in the past but it looks like sticking with Gutenberg was the right choice.

    Thanks for these encouraging tips.

  3. All very good tips to speed up a website
    Gutenberg & Stackable is a very good combination to replace Page Builder such as BeaverBiuilder, Divi and Elementor because there is far less code overheads with Gutenberg/Stackable combination which makes for faster loading pages.

    Also, signup with a hosting provider that uses a caching server such as LiteSpeed or Nginx and use a good page cache plugin. If the budget can stretch to a VPS server so much the better.

    1. Hey Tom! Thanks for the comment and for using Stackable. We’re excited to hear this article was helpful for you. Cheers 🎉

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