Taking a quick break from our Online Reviews Month theme to let you know if you built your website with our WP-EZ Website Builder, your website has the potential to load twice as fast as it did last week.
But, there is one quick thing you need to do to make this happen. I’ll get to that in a moment. Don’t worry, it’s completely free and takes less than a minute
What page speed improvements did we make?
1) Lazy loading – Usually, a web browser has to load all the images and media contained in a web page before it will display the page. With lazy loading, only the images and media that are visible to the visitor are loaded. Images and videos further down the page are loaded later as the visitor scrolls down.
2) Image optimization – We’ve written in the past about How to Optimize Photos for Faster Load Times. Now we’ve added a plugin to WP-EZ that does a lot of this automatically. It doesn’t do everything though. It does not resize the dimensions of images. It also does not optimize images with a filesize larger than 1 MB. Click the link above for instructions on how to do those things.
3) Lots of behind the scenes stuff – I won’t bore you with details about minifying code, caching files, and aggregating scripts. Just know these things speed up your website
How much faster will my website be?
The improvement will vary from website to website, but the group of websites we tested went from a load time of 5.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds. That means…
We cut the load time of websites in half!!!
One Little Thing You Need to Do
If you built your website using WP-EZ, most of these improvements have already been made, but there is one little thing we need you to do. The image optimization plugin needs to be told to optimize the images already on your website. Here’s how to do this:
2) Click to your WP-EZ Dashboard
3) In the left sidebar, go to Media > Optimize.
4) Click on “Bulk Smush Now” button.
Image optimization will start. How long it takes to optimize your image will depend on the number and size of the images in your website. You can watch the progress bar to monitor its progress. (Note that the optimization will be done in batches of 50.)
Once completed, it will show a success message.
Are you feeling it? …
I feel the need… the need for speed! -Peter “Maverick” Mitchell
What do you think?
- Do you notice your website loading faster?
- Do you have any questions about the load time improvements or initiating the image optimization?
If you are looking for Christian or church website builder that creates beautiful, fast websites for churches, schools, ministries and businesses. Check out our WP-EZ website builder!
Co-founder & CEO, OurChurch.Com
Paul has been the CEO of OurChurch.Com since its founding in 1996, combining his passion for faith and technology to lead the organization.
An accomplished writer, Paul has authored over 2,000 articles on faith and technology, featured on platforms like ChurchLeaders.com, The JoyFM, and his personal blog, LiveIntentionally.org.
Beyond his professional achievements, Paul serves as an elder at Journey Community Church and is deeply engaged in his community through his involvement with the Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranch and the Safety Harbor Chamber of Commerce. He is a contributing author of the book Outspoken! Conversations on Church Communication.
8 Comments
My dashboard does not have the “Optimize” under “Media”
Hi Dennis, thanks for letting us know, and my apologies for the inconvenience. There was a problem distributing the speed improvements to some websites. We are still investigating the distribution issue, but in the mean time we have manually updated your website so you can start the optimization.
My dashboard does not have the “Optimize” under “Media” either.
It did say this at the top of page:
New image optimization plugin added. Make your website faster – no cost, 1 minute setup. Click here!.
This is what I got when I Clicked: Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page.
When will this start working?
Hi Lauren, we’re still investigating why the speed improvements didn’t get distributed to some websites, but we have manually updated your website so you can start the optimization. Thanks for letting us know, and I apologize for the inconvenience.
To follow-up on the issue reported by Dennis and Laren, the issue that prevented some of the speed optimization plugins from being distributed to some WP-EZ websites has been resolved. All sites should have the Media -> Optimize option in the WP-EZ Dashboard menu. If you notice any other issues or have any questions, please let us know.
I thought our ISP is just faster this time lol I recently changed it to fiber optic and everything appears to be faster. Let me try to do the image optimization and I will let you know if it gets any faster. Thanks for the tips!
I have Paid for the Website but I cant able to finish the website I need my website its needed now because I paid whole the amount through credit card
Hi Janga, you purchased a year of domain name registration but your websites are both free sites. You need to upgrade to a Gold, Silver or Bronze account for it to work with your domain name.