Why is it needed:

In 2021, site load speed and visitor time on-site are becoming important ranking criteria. In connection with this, it’s important that your site loads as quickly as possible and responds to your users at a high speed. That will lead to higher traffic and conversions.

A good number of websites are made on the WordPress platform. Without intervention from the developer, they often don’t have very high loading speeds.

To pick up the pace, you will either need to change your platform, or find a way to make your WordPress site go faster. This article talks about how you can significantly speed up your WordPress site — and thus influence both search results and user behavior.

First-start loading speed:

To begin, you can evaluate your site’s speed with a tool from Google — PageSpeed Insight. This will give you an understanding of the quality of your content loading and help you to understand what problems can be corrected to improve this indicator

To speed up the initial site loading, some important criteria are:

• lazy loading images, images compression
• content caching
• server-side compression
• the improved server response speed
• minimization of scripts

These kinds of problems can usually be solved by hiring a developer.

Website speed after launch:

Today, users are becoming more and more accustomed to dynamically updated content. Social networks, news feeds, and dynamic sites without reloading are some good examples.

Is it possible to make a WordPress site like this?

The answer is YES! 

Starting from version 5.0, the engine provides REST API. This means that now you can work with the WordPress admin panel from any other resource.
For example, from sites built on high-speed engines.

Ready solutions — Frontity, Next.js, Nuxt.js …

This solution is suitable for both new and old WordPress sites.

Benefits:

• Switching to a high-speed engine will increase conversions. Your site will be faster and more user-friendly.
• This is great because search result algorithms from 2020 also take into account the amount of time a visitor stays on a site.
• You will keep the admin area, but the content for the user will work on the basis of high-speed technologies that are friendly to search robots.

Disadvantages:

This will require the site to be improved. And you have to pay for that.
In fact, you will have two sites instead of one.
You will lose the possibility of using WordPress plugins that are not connected to the Rest API.

Today, an excellent option would be to both improve the speed of the site for the user and the loading speed at the first start.
If you live off organic traffic, implementing these tools will give you a competitive edge.

For more on our experience successfully implementing this approach, see:
https://sirinsoftware.com/
https://timeua.info/
https://seatback.co/

Conclusion:

If you want to get high rates of organic traffic — faster loading speed on the first-start and dynamically loaded content — will provide you with a competitive edge. In 2021, this will also make the site look more friendly to search engines.