WordPress platform is currently one of the most popular ones on the market. One of its biggest benefits is the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of the development process. However, while it’s relatively simple to create a WordPress website and run it, it is a whole other story to optimize it. In this case, it is best to hire a professional who will do the optimization with your company’s best interests in mind.
Why Does Speed Matter?
Even though providers offer us faster and faster connection options, the loading speed is still a burning point for many website owners. This parameter significantly affects conversion, bounce rate, traffic, and other important KPIs for the business. Because all other things being rather the same, a person will choose the website that loads faster and does not make them wait. This statement can be supported by our logic, personal user experience, and numerous studies on the topic that can be found on the net.
Most researchers agree that the optimal loading time is from 1.5 to 3 seconds. If the page takes longer to load, more than half of the users leave without waiting for a miracle.
Here’s why a slow WordPress website is always a bad idea:
- Your potential and already existing clients most likely won’t be willing to wait until your website loads. There are now plenty of options on the market, and the next website on the list might load faster, making them stay;
- The loading delays decrease your conversion rate;
- Your clients might not come back to you after facing negative experiences on your website;
- Loading speed affects the website’s ranking in search engines. If the website takes a long time to load, the search engine robot may not have time to index it fully.
Things That Affect the Loading Speed
The time that your website takes to load fully can be affected by many things. Let’s get through some of the most popular ones:
- Excess of design elements. While your designer might love animation and pop-ups, from the customer’s point of view,a those elements are useless if they are slowing down the loading speed;
- Too many add-ons, plug-ins, and scripts. Plugins can be a blessing because they provide additional capabilities to both website visitors and website owners. But too many plugins, add-ons, and scripts slow down the page loading speed - which means it reduces the conversion rate of the website;
- Too many HTTP inquiries. Most of the total load time is taken up by stylesheets, images, and scripts. If you have plenty of those on your website, the chances are high that HTTP requests will lower the download speed. Lightening and simplifying the design, reducing complex elements and unnecessary redirects will help you reduce the loading time;
- The pictures are too big. Optimizing the pictures.
How Can a Development Team optimize your WordPress site?
To create a WordPress website or any other similar solution, either way you need qualified specialists. It is up to you to decide whether you want them to be hired as a part of your permanent staff or in the nearshore dedicated team format. One of the biggest pros of the latter option with a software development team is that you will not have to spend time concerning about the project workload, which is mandatory for in-house staff. The development team structure directly depends on the task they perform. In building such a team, it is important to understand the skills of each team member and effectively distribute tasks based on the technical savvy of the developer.
At first, WordPress may seem like a fairly easy technology, and it’s true, it’s not as demanding as Drupal, for example, but still, if your website is not performing great, you will need the help of an experienced WordPress developer to troubleshoot your site. Most WordPress hosting providers provide development tools to their clients to solve the problem of website downtime. But when choosing to fix the issue singlehandedly, certain difficulties arise since it is impossible to test all the site's functions without knowledge. Therefore, you need a research and development team to figure out how to transfer changes from the local version to the production version without overwriting the data. Depending on the configuration, this process can add another layer of complexity, which professionals should definitely address.
By hiring a WordPress development team to troubleshoot common WordPress issues and errors, you can provide a better user experience, increase conversions, deliver a lower bounce rate, and improve your site's search engine rankings. From a long-term perspective, developing a website from scratch from the design to make up for WordPress, collect the semantic core, and write content.
Costs of Hiring a WordPress Developer
Source: https://mobilunity.com/blog/what-does-a-dedicated-wordpress-developer-mean/
The developer experience comes at a cost. You may decide to spend money on a developer because you are short on time and need to make your website run faster or have a particular design project. If you're unsure about design, engineers will help you too. It's hard to say how much these skills will cost because it depends on what you need. If you need someone to help you create a basic website, it can only cost you a couple of hundred dollars. If you want something a little more complex, you can spend thousands. Knowing what kind of website you are building is important from day one as it will help you and your team move in the right direction. Below is a chart with the average WordPress dedicated developer salary per country.
| USA | Canada | Germany | Ukraine | |
| Salary, annually | $54,146 | $39,665 | $43,120 | $14,654 |
Conclusion
WordPress sites easily rank high in search engine results thanks to the excellent technical optimization of the engine. But, unfortunately, sites created on it are often hacked. But, these are not problems of the engine, but a consequence of its prevalence: it is used by millions of web admins, many of whom are not puzzled by a deep study of security issues. Therefore, you should entrust development, optimization, and maintenance to experienced developers such as a research and development team provided by nearshoring IT experts.