What Is a Reasonable Load Speed for a WordPress Blog?
Many factors affect the load time of a website. Some of these depend upon the network connections between your Web browser and the site host. The configuration of your WordPress server will also impact your site's load time. Do not assume just because the site load speed is slow for you that it is slow for all visitors. Run independent load tests through third-party services to effectively measure your site's load time.
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Measurement
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If you experience slow speeds when accessing your website or persistent latency with WordPress, regardless of which page is loaded, you may wish to investigate the issue further. First, establish an independent benchmark for the load time of your site. This can quickly establish if the loading issues are with your Internet connection or the site itself. It can also help establish a baseline for your site's load time from which you can measure the impact of configuration changes. Two useful independent sites to measure your blog's load time are offered by Pingdom and GTmetrix. Establish your baseline by accessing your website's URL through these independent services and noting the result. Run these tests multiple times to mitigate the impact of temporary network congestion.
Comparing Load Time
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There is no perfectly reasonable load speed for a WordPress blog, but faster loading sites will receive better ranking than slower sites by search engines like Google. Typically, load times under 10 seconds are considered reasonable, according to Jakob Nielsen. Establish a baseline speed and then tweak your configuration and compare the subsequent results to your baseline. If you believe that your site loads slowly, your primary goal should be to improve the speed relative to earlier measurements. You can also test the load time for URLs of popular or comparable blogs to your own, but keep in mind that the best baseline for your site's load time will always be to compare it to earlier tests of your site. Other websites, especially heavily visited or highly commercial sites can deploy a wide range of tricks beyond your reach to improve their load speed.
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SEO Implications
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If your site is too slow, you may lose visitors who click away before the page has fully loaded. Google and other search engines also take into account the load times of websites when ranking pages. All things equal, a faster loading website will rank higher than a slower one. If you are concerned about SEO for your WordPress site, measure and improve your site speed.
Improve Loading Time
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There is a variety of tools available within WordPress to improve load time. There are also factors that may necessitate finding a new hosting provider. Web hosting providers, especially at the lowest price points of shared hosting, over-commit their servers and networks to customers for economic reasons. A slow WordPress site can often be traced back to a hosting provider who runs their network near capacity, and the only solution in such situations is to move your site to a new provider. Short of migration, you can configure your WordPress site to load faster through various optimization steps. The simplest is to install a caching plugin. Optimize your images, your homepage and your database and you can also improve your site's load time.
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References
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