A First Contentful Paint (FCP) score gives you an indication of how much time it takes your site to render. A poor score means your visitors are likely having to wait longer than they should. 

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to improve this. By optimizing your website’s resources, you can ensure that your content loads quickly and keeps users engaged. 

In this post, we’ll explain what FCP is, why it’s important, and how to test your website for this metric. Then, we’ll show you how to improve a poor FCP score in WordPress.

There are a lot of ways to speed up a website, but one of the most effective is using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN stores copies of your site, or select content, on a network of servers, then sends that content to your visitors’ computers from the server that can do it the fastest. This is usually one nearest to them geographically. 

Using a content delivery network distributes your server’s workload — meaning your site loads faster and more reliably while reducing the resources used by your hosting plan. 

Because there are so many options, the question isn’t really whether you should use a CDN for your WordPress site, but which one to use and how to integrate it with WordPress. 

Some CDNs are free. Others come with hefty fees. Some require advanced technical knowledge to set up and others are built for WordPress and can be easily integrated with a plugin.

The point is that not all CDNs are the same. Below, you’ll learn how to choose the right CDN for WordPress and how to install it. Then, we’ll discuss the benefits of using a CDN and answer some frequently asked questions.

When someone tries to visit a page on your site, they enter the URL in their browser, which immediately goes to work. To load the page, it has to “render” all of the elements that make up that page. 

But sometimes, there are CSS or JavaScript files that pause this process, preventing your content from rendering — these are called render-blocking resources. This means that visitors may experience long wait times, which can negatively impact how people perceive your organization and whether they take the actions you’d like. 

In this post, we’ll explain what render-blocking resources are and discuss the benefits of removing them from your site. Then, we’ll show you how to eliminate them in five different ways. 

If you own a site or online store with lots of content or products, search is vital to ensure that your visitors find what they need quickly. For example, people on eCommerce sites are 2x more likely to purchase something when they search.

It’s not enough just to have a search box on your site; the quality of the search results can make or break your visitors’ experience. If visitors can’t find what they are looking for right away, chances are they will go elsewhere, and you will miss out on that purchase or engagement with your site.

The search experience you get out of the box with a self-hosted WordPress site is pretty basic. It is primarily designed to search over your blog and page archives; you either get a hit with your search or don’t.

We strongly recommend using a dedicated plugin like Jetpack Search for your site or store’s search experience.

The success of your WooCommerce store is directly impacted by your site’s performance. With a fast and user-friendly site, you’ll enjoy better search rankings, happier customers, and — most importantly — increased sales.

Over 70% of consumers admit that page speed directly impacts their willingness to purchase from a retailer. Multiple studies show that many eCommerce sites are missing out on sales due to slow site speeds. We’re sure you don’t want to be one of them. 

While there are many techniques that can be used to improve site speed and performance, it can be challenging to quickly get to the root of the problem. If you’re at a loss for where to begin, a plugin like Jetpack Boost can identify areas of improvement and automatically resolve many of the major issues affecting your site’s performance. 

In this article, you’ll learn about how site performance affects your sales, what you can do to improve it, and how a tool like Jetpack Boost can help.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so when it comes to your website, you want the best images possible. The visuals on your site can create an emotional response in your visitors, communicate your message quickly, cross language barriers, and increase engagement. 

Images help tell your story, but some sites might be especially photo-heavy. In fact, no matter what type of site you have, on average, images will make up the majority of your page weight. This can be problematic for some because, while their success might rely on high-quality photos, the more images a site has, the slower it will load. 

Large page size is bad news for page speed — an important metric when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Finding ways to speed up your image load times without sacrificing quality or overall impact will help you achieve the best of both worlds — images that look great and load fast.

You don’t have an SEO strategy unless you have a website performance strategy to go along with it. With each passing Google update, the skill and attention required to consistently rank highly are refined. 

Google is now beginning to roll out ‘page experience’ as one of their ranking factors. Note that page experience is related to, but distinct from, user experience. Google has released a good amount of documentation explaining the specific website performance metrics they’ll be looking for. 

While this update won’t be a drastic change, it will require your website to deliver a page experience that involves more than just speed. Page speed is important, but it’s also too broad of a metric to be very helpful. 

Google’s three new site performance metrics (called Core Web Vitals) measure the tangible visitor experience on each page. 

Don’t have time to learn how to improve Core Web Vitals? Trust us and install our free plugin Jetpack Boost.