How our green hosting speeds up WordPress sites with Litespeed cache
Site speed is important to keep your users happy by showing them your pages quickly, and also pleases search engines so they are likely to give you better rankings.
Why are WordPress sites slow?
There are a variety of reasons WordPress sites can end up slow: A heavy theme, installing too many plugins, accessing the database every time the page loads and using more large images. So how do we fix this?
Theme & plugins
While it’s outside the scope of this article, using a lightweight theme and minimising the plugins installed helps keep speed up. There’s often no need for a clunky page builder and 20+ plugins for a brochure site. All the sites we build are made to be as lean as possible.
Caching
Caching removes the database request, instead showing a saved copy of the page to users. This is much quicker! A clever cache plugin knows when the page has been changed and shows a new versions, and keeps things like shopping carts working as they should.
Images
Using the right image format at suitable sizes is a good start, for example JPGs for photos and PNGs for illustrations. A ‘new’ image format called Webp has entered the fray, and can slash image sizes with minimal visible differences.
The only snags are that not all graphics software can save in webp format, and not all browsers support the format (yet).
Litespeed web server to the rescue
A snazzy bit of software called ‘Litespeed‘ is included with our green web hosting, which speeds up your pages with a cache and can output webp format images automatically for you. A limited free image conversion service is included as well, which automatically replaces your JPG/PNG images with webp format for browsers that support it.
We’ve seen massive improvements to Google Pagespeed scores with this caching and webp image approach.
Upgrade your site today
Switching to better hosting is a quick way to improve your Google Pagespeed scores and keep your visitors (and search engines) happy.
We can migrate your WordPress site and set up Litespeed for you, contact us today