How Do I Create a Slider in WordPress?

With the help of the Smart Slider 3 plugin, WordPress makes it simple to create siders. Let’s go through the detailed instructions to get you started creating your own slider:

• Step 1: Install and Activate Smart Slider 3
  Go to “Plugins” in your WordPress dashboard and select “Add New”.
  Find “Smart Slider 3 “ by searching for it, then click “Install Now” next to the plugin.
  Once the plugin has been installed, click “Activate”.

• Step 2: Access Smart Slider 3
  Now, the WordPress sidebar has added the Smart Sldier 3 menu. To access the plugin’s dashboard click on it.

• Step 3: Create a New Slider
  Click the “New Project” button on the Smart Slider 3 dashboard.
  Choose whether you want to start from scratch or use a template.
  If you choose to build your own, then select the slider type you would like to use (block, simple slider, carousel, or showcase).

• Step 4: Customize your Slider
  You can add and arrange your slides. To add slides select the “Add Slide” button. Add content on each slide, change the settings, and add animations and effects as desired.
• Step 5: Configure Slider Settings
  On the Slider settings page, you can adjust and customize your slider wholly like, autoplay, animation, and controls. In addition, based on the layout of your website, modify the slider.
• Step 6: Publish the Slider
  Click the “Save” button when you are done with customizing the slider.
  There are different publishing possibilities available in Smart Slider 3. You can choose to embed the slider using a shortcode or a widget, or directly insert it into a page or post using the Gutenberg editor or page builder.
• Step 7: Check and Verify
  To make sure that your slider displays and operates as intended, preview it.
  To guarantee responsiveness and the best possible user experience, test your slider on a variety of screen sizes.

What Size Should Slider Images Be in WordPress?

Choosing the right size for your WordPress sliders’ images is essential, to ensure that they blend smoothly into the style of your website and offer the best viewing experience to your visitors.

Let’s look at some recommendations that can help you in choosing the right size for your sliders:

• Aspect Ratio: It is advised to match the slider’s aspect ratio to your website’s general layout and appearance. Choose an aspect ratio that works with the dimensions of your website’s content space.
• Proper Images: The size of the images should match the slider they are placed in. So don’t attempt to fit a 3000 px wide image within a 1200 px wide slider. The same goes for putting smaller images in bigger sliders.
• Full Width, Boxed, and Full Page: Choose whether you want your slider to be contained within a certain content area (boxed), cover the entire width of the browser window (full width), or fill in the browser’s width and height (full page). While the boxed layout can provide a more focused and under-control display, the other two can produce an experience that is more visually striking.
• Responsive Desing: Your slider must be capable of adjusting to various screen sizes. Therefore, select a slider plugin with responsive design choices, such as Smart Slider 3.
• Page Load Times: Even though they are aesthetically pleasing, sliders that require huge image files can considerably slow down page loads. Maintaining the balance between aesthetic appeal and performance is important. If you can, use jpg photos rather than png ones since they load more quickly. A nice slider image should not exceed 500 kb in size.
• Testing and Previewing: To make sure that your sliders are displayed as intended across various devices, it’s crucial to preview them. It’s important to ensure that your sliders adapt properly and maintain their aesthetic appeal.

How Do I Get an Image to Fit a Screen?

You can select how an image will fit the screen when you set it as a background image. You can choose one of five fill modes in Smart Slider 3, for each of your slides. Let’s check out how they work!

• Fill: This is the default option. If necessary, it crops the images so that it fits the whole slider.
• Fit: The entire image is seen, without cropping. The areas where the image can’t reach the slider are left unfilled.
• Blur fit: It doesn’t crop the image. However, it also doesn’t leave any blank areas in the slider. Actually, it fills them with the original image’s blurred form.
• Stretch: Here the image is stretched to fill the slider without being cropped. The visuals frequently become distorted as a result. Use with caution!
• Center: Contrary to popular perception, this setting won’t center the slider. It only places the background image there in its original size. As a result, this mode loses its responsive behavior.

Check out this video for an example of each mode in action:

How Do I Make a Full-Width Slider in WordPress?

A full-width slider in WordPress enables you to make a visually striking effect by leveraging the complete width of the browser window. Creating a full-width slider is simple with the help of Smart Slider 3. So let’s begin:

• Step 1: Install and Activate Smart Slider 3
  Follow the instructions mentioned previously in this post to install and activate the Smart Slider 3 plugin, if you haven’t yet.
• Step 2: Create a New Project
  From the WordPress dashboard select Smart Slider 3. Click on the “New Project” button, then choose the “Full width” layout.

• Step 3: Slider Settings
  In the Slider Editor select the Size tab. To make sure the slider fills the complete width of the browser window turn on the “Force Full Width” option. This option forces the slider to go outside of its container and makes it as wide as your screen. However, it has limitations, so it won’t work in every case.
• Step 4: Customize Your Slides
  Use the “Add Slide” button to add slides to your slider. Then add layers and animations to make it your own. Use the drag-and-drop editor to organize it in a manner you like.
• Step 5: Additional Settings
  Explore the wide range of settings Smart Slider 3 offers.
• Step 6: Preview and Test
  Always previous and test before moving on to the publishing process. Ensure your slider looks how you intended it to look. Test its responsiveness, and make adjustments to achieve the best results.
• Step 7: Publish Your Slider
  After you saved all the changes on your slider, you can publish it in your preferred way by choosing one of the publishing options Smart Slider 3 offers.

How Do I Make a Slider Autoplay in WordPress?

Even in the free version of Smart Slider 3, you can make autoplaying sliders, but the Pro version gives you additional features. Let’s go through each step:

• Step 1: Choose a Slider
  On the WordPress dashboard locate Smart Slider 3 and select it. To edit the slider, click on the one you would like to add autoplay to.
• Step 2: Enable Autoplay
  Go to the “Autoplay” tab inside the sider editor, then toggle the “Autoplay” option to enable it.

• Step 3: Adjust Autoplay Preferences
  Additional options will show up after you enable autoplay. In accordance with your preferences, you can adjust the configuration options.
• Step 4: Customize Autoplay (Optional)
  Advanced settings are available in Smart Sldier 3 to customize the autoplay further. Explore them, and additionally, you can change the options for controls, pause/play buttons, and indicators.
• Step 5: Preview and Test
  To check that the slider begins autoplaying in accordance with the selected parameters, preview your slider. In addition, test on various devices and screens.
• Step 6: Save and Publish
  When you are happy with the autoplay settings, click the “Save” button to keep your modifications. After this, you can publish it in your preferred way.

How Do I Make a Responsive Slider in WordPress?

A responsive slider makes sure that it adapts nicely to all screen sizes and devices, giving your visitors the best possible viewing experience. Luckily, making a responsive slider in WordPress is simple with Smart Slider 3, which is fully responsive. Besides, there are some features you can easily customize before proceeding.

• Font Sizes: To change the font size of your content just use the Text Scale option. The fact that this is a device-specific setting means that you don’t need to worry about changing the font size on other devices, which is one of the numerous advantages of using it.
• Hide Layers On Devices: Anybody can experience having their desktop layers look bad on mobile view. With Smart Slider, you can hide whatever layer you want on any device, so there’s no need to worry. Use the “Hide On” feature in the layer window to get to this option. It can be quite beneficial to be able to hide your layers individually.
• Hide Slides On Devices: If you are using the Pro version, hiding your slides on different devices can be another great option to improve the responsiveness of your sliders.
• Hide Sliders On Devices: Or just simply disable the slider, which will hide everything on the selected device.
• Controls: Your controls can also be hidden since some of them are simpler to use on desktops but on smaller devices, they seem to be more challenging.

How Do I Create a Post Slider?

Making thumbnail sliders for simple navigation is one of Smart Slider 3’s outstanding capabilities. If you want to highlight a number of pages or posts, you can even go one step further and build a WordPress carousel with the help of it.

Although there are many great slider plugins available, let me explain why Smart Slider 3 is unique. You have complete control over the design and can easily make a free full-width slider that looks good on all screens. Additionally, it has more functionality than many other groundbreaking slider plugins.

However, there’s still more! The Dynamic Slider feature is a great tool in Smart Slider 3. You can use this tool to build slides from your WordPress posts that update anytime you make changes to the original post itself. So the maintenance will be simple.

You can make as many dynamic slides as you wish. On top of that, you can create a custom post type slider using Smart Slider 3. This offers full access to the featured image, textual content, URL, post title, categories, and tags of your posts. What’s more, you can add custom layers to design and represent these slides as you wish.

Therefore, Smart Slider 3 is the way to go without any doubt, if you are looking for a user-friendly plugin with advanced customization options, that goes above and beyond the essentials. Give it a try and see how beautiful sliders and carousels can make your website come to life.

How Do You Make a Dynamic Slider?

Now we can move on to the actual process of creating a dynamically changing slider. So follow along for this 5-step guide to create your own:

1. Create a Dynamic Slide

You can add a dynamic slide either to an already-created slider or a new one. When you add new content to your source, the slide will automatically update. You should configure the generator and decide how many dynamic slides you want to have in the slider.

2. Set Up the Generator

There are several sources to pick from. If you have the Pro version of Smart Slider 3, then you can select from 20 sources in WordPress and 27 sources in Joomla to build a post slider from your Joomla articles and WordPress posts.

3. Create Your Own Slider

You can design your own slider if you want to make one that’s distinctive. Additionally, you can import predefined-slider examples in Smart Slider 3 to use as dynamic slides. Simply copy the layout and paste it into your dynamic slide to complete the task.
You can learn more about how to utilize the demo slider in your generator by reading our documentation.

4. Insert Variable

Set variables if you want your content to change dynamically. Where variables are not used, a static layer will be present.

5. Publish the Slider

Your slider can now be published, such as a shortcode, or turned into a Gutenberg block. Your slider will also show up on the frontend and automatically refresh.

How Do I Make a Slider in Elementor?

As you may know in Elemnetor you can create simple sliders. However, there are only 3 layers you can add to it: a heading, text, and a button layer. In addition, they have fixed places, so there’s not much room for creativity. This might be the right choice for some websites. But, if you would like to create a more advanced slider where you would like to add additional content, you need to look for a slider plugin that works well with Elementor.

Let’s look at how you can make it happen with Smart Slider 3:

1. Install and Activate Smart Slider 3
2. Create a new slider and add slides
3. Customize each slide to match your own preferences
4. Create a new page or edit an existing one with Elementor
5. Drag and drop the Smart Slider 3 widget wherever you would like it to be
6. Select your slider
7. Save and Publish

You don’t need to start from scratch, browse the template library to find the most suitable slider for your project.

As you can see using Smart Slider 3 with Elementor couldn’t be easier. Just create your preferred slider, add the Smart Slider 3 widget to Elementor, and select the one you’ve created. It’s effortless, time-saving, and fun.

How Do I Create a Product Slider in WordPress?

Smart Slider 3 is a great tool for building special and functional product sliders for your online store in WordPress. In addition, you don’t have to worry about losing mobile visitors, since Smart Slider will take care of it for you.

With this plugin, you are offered a wide range of options for how to effectively display your products. To show your items from various perspectives or highlight their unique features you can add additional image layers. It also helps you with adding specific information about each product using the heading and text layers. Besides, you can design call-to-action buttons that send your visitors to the category or product pages for additional information.

Live Preview

The fact that you can select from the pre-made templates or create your own slider without any coding experience is pretty fantastic. There are no restrictions on how many sliders you can make.

You can draw attention to your top-selling items, or special deals. Moreover, it’s very simple to add a call-to-action button that will persuade visitors to take action. Both the Carousel and Showcase slider types offer beautiful layouts and perfect responsiveness, depending on what your preferences are. In contrast to the Showcase type, the Carousel type maintains the same number of visible slides regardless of the screen size.

In short, if you would like to create captivating product sliders that easily catch the attention of your audience and help you achieve your goals, then give Smart Slider 3 a go.

Engaging Product Slider Examples

Now, let’s look at some stunning examples of different product sliders, to help you get started with your next project.

Product Carousel

Live Preview

To present your products in an engaging and responsive manner, you can utilize the WooCommerce carousel slider. The amazing thing about it is that it shows numerous products slides together, rather than just one slide at a time, which creates an aesthetically pleasing arrangement. The slider and the slide widths are completely adjustable, and you can even decide how many products you would like to show at once. With this fantastic tool, making a responsive carousel is quite simple.

Full-Width Product Carousel

Live Preview

A really cool slider that’s ideal for presenting your products is the Full-Width Product Carousel. What’s so eye-catching about this is that it introduces some pretty creative concepts, like creating a background with a complementary color to further highlight your items. Additionally, it has space for special slides, including those that advertise offers or encourages your visitors to sign up to your newsletter. They can view several slides at once with this carousel type, allowing them to see more of what you have to offer. It’s an excellent strategy for getting their attention.

Full Page Product Slider

Live Preview

You don’t see the Full-page product slider every day, do you? It’s a wonderful idea to create a full-page product slider to make yourself stand out from the competition. With its cool animations and smooth navigation. The Top 5 Product template takes it to the next level. And the best thing, though? You have plenty of room to include product descriptions and give your buyers all the information they need. This strategy is fantastic for getting their attention and leaving a positive impact.

Showcase Product Slider

Live Preview

The Showcase slider type stands out because it shows several slides at once, giving your visitors more to look at. Bet here’s the cool part: by making the main slide larger than the others, it always focuses all the attention on it. The centered slide gets all the attention thanks to this innovative design, while also showcasing the remaining slides. It’s a great technique to draw attention to your content and keep people interested. Try it out to see for yourself!

Conclusion

Congrats! Now you have a firm understanding of WordPress sliders and how they can advance your website. Throughout this post, we’ve answered the most frequently asked questions regarding sliders, including their advantages and effect on SEO as well as their functionality and customizability possibilities.

By utilizing sliders, you can attract users to your WordPress site, highlight key content, and significantly impact your visitors. Sliders offer an effective approach to engaging your audience and successfully delivering your message, regardless of whether you are a blogger, designer, developer, or business owner.

And Smart Slider 3 is the real deal when it comes to selecting the best slider plugin. It’s the most outstanding option for building gorgeous sliders that blend with your website flawlessly. All thanks to its user-friendly interface, rich customization options, and compatibility with well-known page builders.

Why wait then? Utilize Smart Slider 3, and discover the full potential sliders can bring to your website when you make the right choices. Get ready to engage your visitors with aesthetically pleasing sliders.

We hope this post has given you insightful information and useful advice for your adventure with sliders. Feel free to get in touch with us through our support system if you have any additional questions or need assistance. We are here to help you make your sliders shine!

Thank you for joining us on this slider adventure. Stay tuned for more exciting content and helpful tips on WordPress and web design. Happy sliding!

The post 10+ FAQs on WordPress Sliders: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

What does a cache plugin do?

Generally speaking, cache plugins save your site’s content in a given time and state. After that, they’ll keep displaying the content they’ve saved until you clear the cache. Clearing the cache regenerates the cache files. In other words, it saves yoursite again which makes the changes you’ve made on your site show up.

So, clearing the cache is always a good idea after you make changes on your site. It’s worth noting that some cache plugins clear their cache automatically after you save a post or page.

What are the most popular caching plugins for WordPress?

WordPress powers over 43% of websites. This means WordPress is super popular, both amongst developers and users. Because of its popularity, there are many plugins to give WordPress extra functions. Some plugins let you build your page visually, with no coding knowledge. Others help strengthen its security. Additionally, there are many plugins which help you optimize your website.

There are many popular cache plugins today, each having millions of users. The most popular ones include WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache WP, Super Cache. LiteSpeed Cache is also very popular, but that only runs on LiteSpeed servers. Unfortunately, my test server didn’t run on LiteSpeed, so I wasn’t able to test this plugin.

However, I tested all others listed above. In this article I’ll check which one helps you most to optimize your site where you use Smart Slider. Let’s dig in!

Speed testing of the page

To see which plugin helps the most to optimize my website with Smart Slider, I’ll test each of them. In order to perform fair tests, I’ll use the exact same server for each test. I’ll only enable two plugins: Smart Slider and the cache I’m currently testing. Additionally, I’ll use the TwentyTwenty theme. I’ll use a 10Mb/s connection and an incognito window. Also, I’ve reloaded the page 5 times to leverage browser caching.

Loading speed without any plugins

One of the most interesting aspects of a speed test is to see how a page performs on its own, with no plugins enabled. In other words, when there are no plugins to slow down the page. So, the only thing that affects the page load is the speed of the server, the theme and the content of the page. Here’s how my testing server performs on a page that has only text and a few images.

Speed of Smart Slider

After testing the page load time on a simple page, I also wanted to test how much time it takes for the page with Smart Slider to load. I’ve used the Layer Slider template for testing. During this test, the only enabled plugin I had was Smart Slider. Here’s the speed result:

Testing with WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a paid caching plugin, which powers more than 2 million websites. So, it’s widely popular and it made me super curious about how much speed I can gain by using it. While running the speed tests, I used WP Rocket version 3.10.7. I enabled WP Rocket’s cache option. Additionally, I also enabled the CSS and JS minification and combination options.

That’s a pretty great result. With a slider on the page, WP Rocket managed to make the page load faster than the very first test I had run. That test measured a single page with text and images, without any activated plugins. Pretty impressive job!

Testing with WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest cache is a freemium plugin. This means there’s a free version on WordPress.org you can grab for free to use. But, there’s also a premium version which offers some extra options. For the test, I used WP Fastest Cache free, version 0.9.8. Also, I’ve turned on Minify HTML and CSS, Combine CSS and JS, GZip, browser caching and disabled the emojis.

Testing with WP Super Cache

WP Super cache is a free cache plugin, which is used by more than 2 million websites. I used it’s simple caching and enabled page compression as well. I ran the tests using version 1.7.6.

Testing with W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is another free cache plugin you can download from WordPress.org. After installing it I enabled the cache. I also turned on its minifying options for better performance. The W3 Total Cache version I used for testing was 2.2.1.

Summarized results

Each caching plugin performed pretty well and they made the site load faster. So, I can recommend any of them to you to help you make your site faster. Below there is the summary of how each plugin performed, so you can compare them more conveniently.

Based on the tests, the plugin that helped speed up my site the most was WP Rocket. In fact, it had the fewest requests and smallest load time and page size. WP Fastest Cache deserves second place with its fast load time and small number of requests. But W3 Total Cache follows it very closely with just one more request and 35ms extra loading time.

As mentioned above, I wasn’t able to test the LiteSpeed cache since my testing server is not on LiteSpeed. Keep in mind that LiteSpeed Cache was created for LiteSpeed servers. As a result, it might perform better on those servers than the other plugins. So, it’s worth running your own tests, especially with the free plugins.

Conclusion

Every website is different. For this reason, it’s worth investing some time in finding the best cache plugin for the site at hand. As a result, you can find the plugin that will speed your site up the most. If you’re only looking for a free solution, try WP Fastest Cache or W3 Total Cache. However, if you’re interested in paid plugins, I can recommend WP Rocket for you.

The post What’s the best cache plugin to use with Smart Slider? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

https://smartslider3.com/blog/slider-performance/ Tue, 13 Apr 2021 05:00:33 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=12371 Having a speedy website is crucial when you want to keep your visitors. As a matter of fact, as no one wants to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load. Because of this, everyone wants their site to load fast. But making a site load fast can be challenging, because of […]

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]]> Having a speedy website is crucial when you want to keep your visitors. As a matter of fact, as no one wants to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load. Because of this, everyone wants their site to load fast. But making a site load fast can be challenging, because of the rich media (images and videos) usage. Both images and videos load slower than texts, therefore they need to be optimized for the web.

Smart Slider 3 is a WordPress and Joomla slider plugin and it is a great choice to add rich media to your website. You can create an image slider, a video slider, even a whole landing page with this plugin. In this article I’ll show you how to check your site’s speed and how to speed up your sliders.

What can slow down a website?

The quick answer: anything. Even texts can slow down the page if they are really long. In most cases, the problem originates from the used rich media. Or it could be the fact that the server is just not fast enough to return the requested content in a timely manner.

Would you like to know how fast your site is? Use Google PageSpeed Insights to measure your site’s speed. It checks how fast your site loads, and gives you tips on where to improve it. Google PageSpeed Insights is an incredible tool. For this reason, they built it into Chrome browser, where it’s called Lighthouse.

The metrics of speed

Lighthouse has several different metrics which can describe your site speed. They’re all important to understand how to improve your site, so I’ll explain them in a few words.

• First Contentful Paint (FCP), which measures when the browser renders the first bit of content. It’s the first feedback to the user that the page is actually loading.
• Speed Index (SI) shows you how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) provides details about the largest image or text paint before user input.
• Time to Interactive (TTI). It’s the point in time when the last Long Task finished.
• Total Blocking Time (TBT): it measures the total amount of time between FCP and TTI
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a user-centric metric for measuring visual stability

The values of these metrics give you hints where you can improve your website. Unfortunately, usually, it is not so straightforward where to start. This is especially true if you’re new to web development.

What’s the best way to optimize your website?

Based on our experience the best way to optimize your website is by following this checklist:

1. Use a reliable hosting provider. A throttled web server can destroy all your achievements.
   1. Run the latest version of server software
   2. Use PHP with opcache enabled
   3. Use Cloudflare as middleware and set up caching policies properly
2. Always use the latest WordPress available
3. Test your theme in an empty WordPress installation and optimize it until you reach 100/100 on an empty page. You can find out the best example of how to do it here.
   1. You can try to optimize plugins to see which gives the best results with your theme.
   2. Prepare your “Link” header to give a hint to the browser on what to preload. This could be the style.css, a font family and every render-blocking resource.
   3. Try to get rid of as many render-blocking resources as you can.
   4. Use only one external font family and make sure it’s a variable font that is locally hosted.
   5. Reduce JavaScript usage and drop jQuery if you can
4. Use plugins that are optimized for Lighthouse. You won’t be able to fix a third-party plugin without breaking its updates.
5. Prepare your content for good scores. For example, use fewer images and videos above the fold. Also, make sure your images and videos are as optimized as possible.

How much impact plugins have on my site’s performance?

Every plugin you install on your website will eventually impact your site’s performance. They’ll lower your page speed score, and slow down your website. The only exceptions are optimizing plugins, as their purpose is to improve speed. What you should consider is how much impact each plugin has on your site performance. Also, whether the functionality the plugin gives you worth the price of performance.

If you’re looking to buy a plugin, ask the developers how they optimized their plugin for Lighthouse. Also, test the (demo) website of the plugin with Lighthouse yourself to see how well it performs. If the demo site’s performance is poor, you can’t expect to have good results on your own site either. After all, if the developers couldn’t make their own site perform well, how could you?

As a matter of fact, we’re convinced the content you create with Smart Slider 3 is important. It helps you give your users an amazing and memorable experience with your website. For this reason, we made every effort to optimize Smart Slider 3.5. As a result, our homepage, which we created using sliders only (except the header and the footer) got a 100/100 score. Isn’t that amazing?

Why is my slider loading slowly?

First of all, make sure that your slider is loading slowly on your website and not anything else. It might seem that Smart Slider 3 loads slow, but actually the whole site is slow. If your site isn’t fast, your slider can’t load fast either.

You can see what loads on your website for how long, if you use a website speed test. Or you could use Chrome or Firefox browsers. In this case, press F12 → click on the “Network” tab and refresh the page with hard refresh. Here you will see all elements of your page, and you can order them according to the loading time, too.

To create a fast-loading and optimized slider, it is important to pay attention to the quality and size of the images. A large image can slow down your slider and it can be disturbing for the visitor. You should pay attention that a small image can have a big size too if its quality is too good. Above a particular level of quality, people’s eyes can’t see the difference so don’t use images with too high quality.

Slider performance tips & tricks – How to create a fast-loading slider?

A fast-loading website is an expectation nowadays. Creating a slider can be an important point at the loading time of a Joomla or WordPress as well. So if you don’t use your slider properly, it can be slow. There are a few tips & tricks which you can create an optimized slider with.

1. Choose the correct image size

Choosing correct images is the most important part of optimizing your slider’s performance. First, make sure your images don’t weight more than 500kb. The easiest is to resize the pictures before you upload them to your website. An optimal image width is 1920px for a full width slider. So try to aim for that.

Also, you should pay attention to the quality of your media. In other words, don’t add too high quality pictures to your site. Additionally, if you use .jpgs instead of .pngs, you can save space, too.

2. Always plan your slider

Don’t rush into the slider creation. Plan your slider, prepare the assets (images, videos) you’ll use. Make sure they’re correctly sized for the slider you’ll create. It’s always better to think ahead, right? Check our slider checklist, and create a good-working slider.

3. Avoid using linked Absolute positioned layers.

Linking an Absolute layer means that it’s no longer positioned from its container, but from another Absolute layer. So, to be able to display the linked layer, the slider first need to calculate the position of the layer it’s linked to. After that, it can start to calculate the position of the second layer. This takes time, and the slider can’t show up until every layer position is calculated. Therefore using linked layers will slow down your site, and you should avoid using them.

4. Reduce the number of slides

Unless you want to make a gallery, don’t put more than 5 slides to your slider. If you have too many slides, and you have lots of layers on them, that can negatively impact the loading speed. Also, the slider can’t be so successful and not only because of the speed. If you have too many slides, the visitors won’t click through them. Try focusing on your most important message!

5. Header preload

You should preload every part of your site which counts as a render-blocking resource. If sliders play an important part in your website’s content, you should preload it in Smart Slider Global Settings → Framework → Header Preload.

6. Reduce the number and styles of fonts

Using many different font-families also can increase the loading time. Try to limit the number of the font-families to maximum 3. If you use icons, choose from only one icon set, because loading different icon sets takes more time, too.

7. Use SVG icons

Usually you’ll see font icons on the web. Smart Slider 3’s icon layer uses icons from the most popular libraries, such as Font Awesome 4 and Icomoon. Using such icons requires loading an extra font family and CSS file per font library. This affects your site’s speed.

8. Use a local cover image for videos.

When you add a YouTube or Vimeo video to your slide, it loads a cover image for the video. This image is coming from YouTube or Vimeo, and not from your own site. This means the speed of your site depends on how fast they serve the image. To ensure the optimized loading, use a cover image you host on your site.

9. Set the proper loading type for your sliders

Unless your slider loads above the fold, it shouldn’t load instantly, but only after the page has loaded.

10. Use the optimization settings of Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider 3 has many different options to help you optimize your slider. For example, you can convert your background and layer images to WebP format. Also, you can resize the pictures for desktop, tablet and mobile. As a result, you can optimize the loading for all kinds of visitors.

Smart Slider 3 optimization settings

There are cases when you can’t do some optimization steps. For example, if your slider is already published, you can’t just go and replace every png image with jpg. It would be super time-consuming. But there are still a bunch of tricks to speed up your slider.

For a better understanding, let me illustrate the possibilities with a few examples. I will create a new slider in Smart Slider 3 with three slides. Each slide has a background image (1, 2, 3), but they don’t have any layers. The file size of the images is pretty large, and they have high quality. The total file size of the three images is more than 15Mb. As a result, adding them to your site in any way will immediately slow it down.

Image optimization

The first image optimization option you should use is the Convert to WebP. WebP is a new image format for the web, which allows creating images with low file size but still great quality. So, the Convert to WebP option creates super fast loading WebP images from your pictures. Additionally, it reduces the file size, too.

You can also resize the converted WebP images to reduce their dimension. This way, you can get a more optimized image for each device.

As you can see, using the Convert to WebP option, the page size decreased 10 times. Additionally, this option drastically reduced the page loading time.

Furthermore, you can convert your layer images to WebP as well. As a result, you can reduce the size of the images you used in your layers. It’s worth noting that the Convert to WebP option works only on certain layers. For example, on the image layer, caption layer, and transition layer.

Lazy loading

Smart Slider 3 offers a lazy loading option for the slide background images. You can find it at Slider settings → Optimize tab → under Loading. It has two different options to help you fine tune your slider’s loading. The Delayed loading which loads the images after everything else has been loaded.

But what will make the most difference is the Lazy Loading. It only loads as many slide background images at once, as you want. For example, you can only load the first image of your slider. The other images will only load when the visitor switches to their slide. As a result, you can save up lots of loading time!

Since I have only three images, I set the slider to load only the first slide’s image. To achieve this, I set the Lazy loading → Load neighbor to 0 slides. As a result, only one of the 3 images will load.

As you can see, using the Lazy Loading option made the page load fast. Using the Convert to WebP and Resize options, the page loaded under 1 seconds. That’s a super fast loading time!

Additionally, the lazy loading option made the page load faster without using optimized WebP images. This means just by lazy loading your images you can save precious loading time.

Loading type

If your slider is not above the fold, it should not load instantly. So, at every slider which is below the fold, you should change the Loading type to After page loaded. This way, the slider’s codes won’t be loaded until the visitor scrolls to the slider.

The table below shows how much difference the After page loaded option makes. It’s worth noting that for this check, I placed the slider below the fold.

Speeding up a self-hosted video slider

If you have a video slider where you use your self-hosted videos, some of the suggestions above won’t help you at all. However, there are some tips that you can still apply to your case. For example, you can make your video have the same size as your slider. Remember, a background video doesn’t have to have too high quality. So you can reduce the file size by reducing the quality.

Also, you can disable the slide background video on mobile at the Optimize tab. So you can save loading time for your mobile users, and they will see only the background image.

Additionally, you can make Smart Slider 3 not to call your video until the slider is ready. You can achieve that if you set a slide background image, too. In this case, you can decrease the loading time of your page, because first the background image will load. You have many options to optimize the background image, so it will load a lot faster than the video ever could. Then video will start when the slider is completely ready.

Is your website still slow?

If you enabled the optimization options listed above without any effect, try using a cache or CDN. Joomla offers some caching methods by default that you can try. But for WordPress, you will need a 3rd party WordPress plugin, such as WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache.

Final Thoughts

Realizing that your website has slowed down never feels good. It can cause a headache when you try to figure out what causes the loss of speed. Also, you might make desperate steps when trying to make compromises to get back your fast pages.

Remember, most of the speed depends on the used rich media (both file size and amount). And that is something that you can optimize easily. For example, if you use Smart Slider, you can turn on a couple of options, and the slider will take care of the problems. Having a speedy slider (and webpage) is worth that few extra clicks, isn’t it?

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How to use a slider on your website?

Sliders are versatile design elements that can fit any website. Because of that, there are good and bad ways to use them. In fact, I could write endless lists to tell you what you should or should not do with your slider. Instead here are five easy-to-follow rules to help you answer the question: should I use a slider?

• Create sliders with a purpose. When you put any element on your website, they must serve a purpose. No matter how tempting it is, don’t use a slider just for the sake of having one.
• Keep user experience in mind. Sliders are logical design elements, but that doesn’t mean you can forget about the visitor. Make sure any action you want them to take is easy and straightforward. If you add a CTA, make sure it’s easy to notice.
• Give control. It’s popular to make sliders play automatically. If you choose to do this, make sure to allow the visitor to stop the autoplay on demand.
• Give context. A large image on your home page without any context will do no good to your website. Besides, it’ll confuse your visitor and have a negative impact on your website. Add some text to the slides, like a heading, a description and a CTA button.
• Avoid too much content. There’s only one thing worse than a slider without any content: one that has way too much. Of course, too much content on a slider is rather subjective. But if your slider is full of text and there’s not a single empty line, you can be sure that its too much.

Why don’t people like sliders?

It’s hard to find any other design element that divides designers and developers as much as sliders do. The internet is full of articles claiming that sliders are evil and you shouldn’t use them.

On the other hand, there are many good sliders out there, but they’re being punished by other’s bad practices. Sliders aren’t as bad as some people try to make them seen. In fact, they’re versatile enough to let you use them for any purpose.

So here are the most common seven reasons you’ll find about why you shouldn’t use a slider.

1. Sliders lower conversion rate

Usually, people put sliders to the top of the page. This makes them use up their most important real estate, without urging users to take action. An article I found claims that even if you put a CTA button on each slide, visitors won’t click on them. Well, if you check out the example slider they used to support this theory, you can confirm it’s true. You need to focus on the slider to notice the subtle Shop now button.

In fact, a good slider plugin lets you create much better CTA for your slider, which stands out and easy to see. A good CTA on your slider increases the conversion rate, because it gets clicked.

2. Sliders cause banner blindness

That was one of the most popular reasons I’ve seen. Banner blindness, in case you’re wondering, means that people ignore a section of a website, because it looks like an advertisement. People don’t like ads, that’s why adblock extensions are so popular. If your slider looks like a banner or advertisement, visitors won’t notice them.

The Neilson Norman group ran a usability study back in 2013. The visitor had to go to Siemens’ website and see if there are any special deals on washing machines. On this site, there were two sliders, which failed to do this simple task.

Here’s the biggest problem with the sliders on that page: they look like an ad, which people ignore. To make things worse, the top slider keeps rotating every 5 seconds. Now imagine you just arrived to the website and try to read and understand the first slide in five seconds. It’s an impossible task, no wonder the visitor ignored the slider.

3. Sliders are not SEO friendly

SEO is an important factor for every serious website. Therefore, website owners carefully choose what to put to their site to make it SEO friendly. However, their efforts are pointless if they add an element that isn’t SEO friendly. As a matter of fact, some people think sliders destroy the SEO of the page they’re on.

The fact that there are many sliders, which aren’t SEO friendly in 2020 is disturbing. But not all slider plugins follow the bad example. For instance, Smart Slider 3 is an SEO friendly slider plugin. As a result, it will not only not ruin your SEO, but it can help improving it.

4. They move too fast

I’m sure you’ve came across shouldiuseacarousel.com when you were trying to decide if you should use a slider. This website builds its argument on user experience.

The slider they use autoplays, like lots of other sliders do. Not only that, it moves so fast, it’s impossible to read the content of the slides. This forces the visitor to keep switching back to be able to read each slide’s content.

Here’s the thing: sliders don’t have to autoplay. Neither do they have to autoplay fast and sacrifice the user experience. In case you really need autoplay, then rather allow the user to stop and restart it when needed. But you can completely forget about autoplaying your slider. Instead of autoplay, consider giving full control to the user. Create CTA buttons, which switch slides when the visitors clicks them. This way the visitors get what they like the most: control over the content.

5. Sliders aren’t responsive

We’re living in an era, where over 60% of mobile users browse the internet from phone. This is a large number, which justifies the need of a good, responsive website. Despite the large demand, there are still many sliders, which are not responsive. Because of that, the site they’re on won’t be responsive anymore.

Smart Slider 3 isn’t one of the not-responsive slider plugins. In fact, it offers many options to optimize your slider for mobile devices. Because of this, you don’t need to worry about the responsive behavior of your slider if you choose Smart Slider 3.

6. Sliders are slow and will slow down your website

A heavy slider on your home page drastically slows it down. It also wastes important real estate on your site. For this reason many people suggest using a hero image or a static image instead of a slider. Unlike most sliders, these elements need only one image, which reduces the files the side has to load.

But a good slider plugin, like Smart Slider 3, cares about the speed of your website. It has cool optimization features, like lazy loading or image resizing. As a result, your website can load faster – even with a gorgeous slider on it!

7. They have accessibility problems

There are many examples and recommendations to help developers make their slider accessible. But many developers choose not to follow them. As a result, their product ends up having accessibility problems. Their users are left with two choices: drop the slider or fail to make their website accessible.

We know how important it is for everyone to be able to browse the web in a convenient way. This is why we developed Smart Slider 3 with accessibility in mind. In fact, we always improve the slider’s accessibility.

Conclusion

After reading many articles on the topic, I’ve came to a surprising conclusion. While all articles claim that sliders are bad, it seems it’s not the actual sliders that they don’t like. It’s rather the sliders’ design choices and the way they were set up.

Indeed, they’re right in some ways. If a slider isn’t user friendly, or bad for SEO or not responsive, it has no place on a website. But a slider that fulfills these criterion and is made well has its place. After all, sliders are the most versatile design tools you can use. So if you still haven’t answered the “should I use a slider?” question, there’s one last thing you need to know.

Sliders aren’t evil, they’re just not used well.

The post Should I use a Slider? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

https://smartslider3.com/blog/astra-theme-slider/ Sat, 28 Mar 2020 09:23:07 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=10371 In our busy world we can’t spend lots of time building websites, sometimes we have just a few days. But if you aren’t a developer, can you build a website? Can you make it in such a short time? Can you simply customize and make it responsive? Yes, it is possible! With the Astra Theme […]

The post Build Your Website Easily with Astra Theme and Smart Slider 3 appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> In our busy world we can’t spend lots of time building websites, sometimes we have just a few days. But if you aren’t a developer, can you build a website? Can you make it in such a short time? Can you simply customize and make it responsive? Yes, it is possible! With the Astra Theme and with a slider you can build a good-looking site just in a few hours. And with a slider you can cheer up your site. Smart Slider 3 is a great possibility to realize this in your Astra Theme.

In this article I will show you how you can build your website with Astra Theme and Smart Slider 3.

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About Astra

Astra is a very simple and customizable theme in which you can customize your own content. This theme has simple editing options. The Theme is available for free at WordPress.org and it has wide-ranging popularity. It has 1+ million active installs and 5/5 stars rating.

So you can trust it!

Astra is made for page builders, therefore you can customize it without a coding knowledge. You can change the design in the WordPress Customizer. Besides that it offers you ready to import websites. You should just install the Starter Templates plugin to get the beautiful layouts.

Using the Astra Theme is very extensive. You can use it for your blog or you can make an eCommerce, a small agency or a business website. You can change everything in the Theme, and can reach the result what you imagined.

It is important mention that Astra is made for speed. And this isn’t just a “marketing trick”, this is a real fact what the Theme promises. But I will write about that later.

Has the Astra Theme slider tool? Unfortunately not, and I miss it. Slider makes your site more expressive, but you can use the Smart Slider 3 plugin, and you can easily put it into your theme. So if you want to build a website using free tools, Smart Slider 3 with Astra Theme provides you a great option.

How about page builders?

Page builders are very populated in WordPress. You should just imagine what you want, and with simple drag and drop your website is ready. But a page builder can’t work well without a good theme. A theme should be optimized to be highly compatible for page builders.

Astra offers different solutions with which you can be sure that your website will look exactly how you imagined it. It gives you more space to focus on design. At the post and pages you can disable the header, title or the footer. You can switch a layout inside a post/page, and you can choose a sidebar option as well.

So Astra lets you customize every setting on every page, so you can simply personalize your website. You can focus on the content. There aren’t places what you can’t change with a page builder, if there is something, you can easily switch that off.

How about sliders?

Nowadays I can’t imagine a website without a hero image, and a slider is an extended version of that. In a slider there are multiple versions of your hero images which you can make your site even more professional with.

Sliders are particularly good design tools which allow images, videos and other content like CTA buttons. The content can be expressive and maximizes the space on your website as well.

When a person visits your website, it makes a good impression on them if your site:

• is easy to read,
• simple,
• clear,
• and good-designed.

And sliders can add these conditions for your website.

Tutorial: Astra Theme with Smart Slider 3 – Website in 1 Hour

Import a template from Starter Templates

In Astra there are a lot of free and premium ready to import websites. You should download just the Starter Templates plugin and you can choose which page builder you are using: Elementor, Beaver Builder, Gutenberg or Brizy.

Using these templates is a good choice, they look gorgeous, modern and can be imported easily. Some of the templates are only available in paid version, but there are a lot for free ones.
You can preview them and by 2 clicking you can import what you want.

First you should install the plugins which are in your chosen template. Finally you can import the site.

Import a slider from the Template Library

You have a ready template now and you need just a slider to the top. You can use slider easily in Astra Theme, and if you want to be ready fast, Smart Slider 3 has a Template Library as well. And you can import a slider from there.

In the Slider Library there are a lot of premium and free sliders, now I will import a free one.

After that you can customize your slider and you can put it into your Astra Theme. Adding to Astra Theme slider is very simple with your favorite page builder. You should just use the Smart Slider 3 widget, and you have a slider in your site now!

If you would like to learn about how you can publish Smart Slider 3, watch our video:

It took about 5 minutes to have a ready template on your site considering that you have looked around on the Astra Site and knew which Astra template you would use. Importing a slider and putting it in your template is not more than 5 minutes. So you have 50 Minutes yet if you would like to finish your page in one hour.

Now you should just personalize your content. Very fast, very simple and you can enjoy building a website.

Creating in Astra Theme slider for the heading part

With Astra Theme you can even make a custom header with Smart Slider 3. This is also simple, you can choose a widget type for header in the Customizing → Header → Primary menu.

Then in your Customizing menu → Widgets you can set the Smart Slider 3 widget.

You should just choose which slider would you like to display. And now you have a header on all of your pages with your slider.

But there are more options to apply your Astra Theme slider, first of all you can download the Astra Hooks plugin. With this plugin you can paste a shortcode fast everywhere on your page.

You should just copy and paste your sliders’ shortcode into a place where you want to display it.

So I can tell you there are a lot of options to make your own website.

How about speed?

The speed of your webpage is the most important thing what you have to consider. People don’t have lots of time to wait loading your site, so it should be fast. It depends on a lot of factors, but choosing a good Theme and a fast hosting can be the solution.

Astra loads only about 0.5 second. That is usually short, because most homepages load about 1MB. It is optimized for speed, and needs only 50 KB of resources to load. It doesn’t use jQuery, instead of that it uses Vanilla. And Astra Theme gets high ratings in all page speed test tools.

Smart Slider 3 only loads after everything else has finished loading on your website to be able to calculate the positions where everything should be. Normally it doesn’t take lots of time, but if you uploaded a high quality picture it can be slower. So most of the speed depends on the used rich media. But in Smart Slider 3 you have the opportunity to optimize your slider.

Smart Slider 3 offers a lot of speed settings for you in the Pro version.

What can you do to optimize your slider?

• Choose the correct image size: Use images where the dimensions are close to your slider size!
• Use device specific images: You can use device specific images what can be easily set, also you can optimize your images even better.
• Reduce the number of slides: Don’t use too many slides on your page! Furthermore you can display your images randomly. This is also an option in Smart Slider 3.
• Use the Smart Slider 3 image resizing feature: The Optimize tab → Layer image resize and Background image resize options can be really useful. They will resize the images to the sliders size automatically.
• Use the lazy loading: With this feature you can set up that a certain number of images load.

So Smart Slider 3 in Astra Theme takes care of your problems with the speed.

Final Thoughts

I can recommend Astra Theme to everybody who starts building a website now and doesn’t know which Theme to choose. It loads fast, it is clean and you can fully customize it. And it works fine with Smart Slider 3, hence you can take your site more professional.

Astra is a great decision if you like to use page builders, and Smart Slider 3 is the best choice to use a slider in your Astra Theme. With this Theme and with this plugin you can save a lot of time.

The post Build Your Website Easily with Astra Theme and Smart Slider 3 appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

https://smartslider3.com/blog/most-common-wordpress-speed-optimization-myths/ Mon, 30 Sep 2019 05:00:52 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=22176 Website speed is an actual Google ranking factor. That’s why you need to emphasize site speed and performance. Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution to slow web speeds. There is no magic plugin, script, or tactic that will instantly speed up your website. Optimizing a WordPress site’s performance can be a daunting task, especially for larger […]

The post Most Common WordPress Speed Optimization Myths appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Website speed is an actual Google ranking factor. That’s why you need to emphasize site speed and performance. Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution to slow web speeds. There is no magic plugin, script, or tactic that will instantly speed up your website. Optimizing a WordPress site’s performance can be a daunting task, especially for larger sites.

This is a guest post written by Matija Kasapović, who is the owner of KasaReviews website. If you would like to write a guest post contact us.

Optimizing a website can be a difficult subject, whether you’re a developer or not. You will find a lot of published guides and online tutorials. Keep in mind the fact that most of them are written for a broad audience scope. They might not help much in improving your specific situation.

Here are a few common WordPress speed optimization myths that I would like to dispel.

1. More plugins result slower sites

When you first set up your WordPress site, you have a lot of tools at your fingertips. It can be very tempting to use as many available plugins as possible to add various features to your site. However, this can sometimes do more harm than good. Outdated, useless, or otherwise conflicting plugins can slow down your website and cause unexpected problems.

Plugins are okay as long as used effectively. Use only the ones that benefit your website. Uninstall or delete any plugins that are either outdated or serve no useful purpose.

Despite popular belief, it’s the quality, not the quantity of plugins that matters. It just takes one poorly-written plugin to cause errors or your site. Take some time to review your current plugins and remove ones that you don’t use or no longer need for your site needs.

2. You must use CDN

Content delivery network, or CDN, helps you serve assets (e.g., images, CSS files, JS files) to your visitor. They serve assets from the closest location to them as possible to reduce latency. Latency is the length of time it takes a server to send content to a user’s browser. The farther away visitor is from the server, the longer the delay in receiving content.

To put this in context, imagine you’re playing basketball and shooting on a basket. The farther away from the basket you are throwing a ball, the longer it will take for the ball to reach the basket. This same principle applies here. Using a CDN, content is distributed to site users around the globe. You rely on a network of servers to serve your site. As a result, the information is sent from the server closest to the visitor.

A CDN is an invaluable resource for companies and sites that have an international audience. If your reach is much smaller, that may be an unnecessary cost. If your server is located in, for example, Mexico and your site visitors are primarily from Mexico, then CDN might not bring many benefits. But if your visitors are mostly from Europe, then using CDN can help.

CDNs also act as an external server. This means that they have to conduct a DNS lookup to find each external server. That process can take considerable time (about 200 ms). If you’re going to use a CDN, make sure that the amount of time saved is more significant than the time spent for DNS lookup and resolution.

3. You should use all types of caching

There are many different caching options available. Database caching, page caching, Memcached are just a few of the many options. Some experts and publications will recommend using all available caching resources.

If you have a site that doesn’t have caching, your server will have to go into your database to find and collect all necessary components. Then it relays them to the browser via PHP for your site users every time they visit a particular page. This can take considerable time to accomplish.

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Page caching creates static HTML content files. This means that your PHP won’t have to regenerate your pages every time someone visits them. This saves a lot of time. Whenever someone visits a website that uses page caching, they’re not accessing the site’s database. Sometimes page caching makes caching the database unnecessarily.

There are also some instances where database caching maybe more effective. One example is sites that are very dynamic and in which page caching may not be realistic. However, this is an exception to the rule. For most bloggers and owners of different type of websites, there’s no need to worry about database caching.

Specific forms of caching operate at the server level. If you’re on a managed or shared hosting server, you maybe limited as to what you can do. The server’s host is in control. In these cases, you can still install a plugin for page caching, which is something that most site owners can do easily.

4. Caching plugin is all you need

A caching plugin is a great way to make your website faster. But it’s not the only tool that you can use. You can Optimize WordPress sites on many layers. When correctly configured, a caching plugin will definitely help. It can be a quick fix if your website is underperforming. But it’s just the final step in improving site speed.

Caching plugins can’t fix common problems such as poor code, but they can help minimize the effects. Taking the time to fix other component issues of the site can improve your website’s speed and performance.

5. Reduce HTTP requests

Many themes and plugins load images and script files from sites such as Facebook and Google, which can impact load times. If the plugins that you use make a lot of requests, don’t be surprised to see slower load times.

A common rule of thumb is to limit how many HTTP requests your site has to make. This is a good guideline, but there’s a little more to it than that. The great example regarding this is minification. Many minification plugins and tools will compress smaller CSS files into one large file. That means that instead of having 10 CSS files on your website, there’s now only one. That’s one HTTP request instead of 10 separate requests.

While this may be the optimal solution, it really depends on your situation. Most current web browsers can download multiple files at a time in parallel. In this case, you are better off having your browser download multiple files at the same time instead of waiting for one large file to download. Every site’s results vary, so you will need a test which option best fits your website.

6. You need expensive hosting to have better site speed

Having a good, reliable host for your WordPress site is essential. You can have two identical sites on two different hosting sites, and they will load completely different.

Most popular hosting providers spend considerable time on improving and maximizing performance. Shared hosting is a popular choice for many small businesses because it’s affordable. Just keep in mind that you are sharing resources with many other sites at the same time. A high-performing site on a shared server can slow down the performance of other sites on that network.

Free web hosting services are usually not recommended because they often have downtime and slow speed issues. Investing in good hosting is worth the expense. Poor hosting can limit how fast your site runs and could lead potential customers to do business with competitors. There are many great hosts out there. Cheap hosting isn’t always bad, and expensive hosting isn’t always great.

7. All WordPress themes are speed optimized

The amount of themes that you can choose is impressive so it’s important to consider speed when selecting one. Many well-known themes have bad coding, which can affect loading times. You need to choose a theme that is both visually appealing and has excellent performance in terms of speed. It may take a little bit of trial and error until you find a theme that strikes the perfect balance between these factors.

A lot of WordPress site owners choose basic themes and select high-performance plugins to achieve their desired visual feel and efficiency. Most of the code on your site is coming from themes so ones with poor coding can slow down a website. Multipurpose or “one size fits all” themes contain a lot of features. Some of them have extra scripts that they load but don’t use. If you have one of these kinds of themes, only activate the features that you’ll use.

8. Grade from page speed tools is important

After you’ve used a website speed testing tool such as GTMetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, or others, your site will get a grade for its performance. You also get a list with different recommendations. People think that their site needs to have a perfect grade.

When a Googlebot goes to a site, all it looks at is how fast your pages load. It doesn’t know which grade speed testing tools gave your site. Higher grades don’t necessarily mean faster page load times. Speed grades and recommendations identify bottlenecks and other potential problem areas of your website. But each tool grades the same site differently.

Suggestions can improve your page loading times, but some are not very beneficial or can be challenging to execute. An example of this is when Google PageSpeed recommends moving JS and CSS files to your page’s footer. Some JS files are easy to move, but others could damage or break your site if moved. If you load your website without using CSS styles, it can appear to your site visitors that your site is broken. Performance grades are nice, but they don’t matter. How fast your pages load is what’s really important.

Optimizing WordPress Website Summary

WordPress is very easy to customize. It lets you optimize your site performance and speed as much as you need. Higher performing sites need more customization than most simpler projects.

Page load times can significantly affect how you run your online business. They impact conversion rates, bounce rates, user satisfaction, and the likelihood of repeat visitors to your site. WordPress page speed optimization can quickly become a world of wp-config.php, robots.txt, server architecture, and other factors that are often confusing or intimidating at first.

Speed optimization needs are different for every site. Sometimes you will need to try a few alternatives until you find the optimal solution. You will get a lot of advice and recommendations from outside sources, but not all will be beneficial.

WordPress is not the fastest platform to use, but there is always a way to improve your page load times without having to write any code.

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