Original Gallery or a Plugin: What’s Better for a Website?

Loading time is one of the most crucial factors when it comes to a website’s conversion and rankings. Slow and sluggish pages are costing their owner’s potential visitors and money. It will drive your website down in searches, and affect SEO.

WordPress is one of the most popular CMS’s with over 60% of the market share. This means that WordPress powers 33,5% of websites. It’s easy, it’s cheap, and all you have to do is purchase a domain name and hosting.

Images and videos are an inseparable part of every webpage. That’s why it’s so important for every WordPress user to use them most efficiently. But do you know how to add a to a website and be certain that it loads quickly for your users?

What Is a Plugin?

A plugin is a program that extends the functionality of a product with one specific function. Plugins can add new features to your website and boost its performance.

WordPress plugins are a group of plugins written in the PHP programming language. They are integrated with WordPress. They make it easier for users without an IT background or any web design experience to add new features to their pages.

The library of WordPress plugins is vast. There is an official directory with a lot of them available for free. Except for using free ones, there is an amazing number of plugins accessible commercially.

Image Galleries

If you experience problems with your website’s speed, the first thing you need to check is your image quality. Images a big part of a page and not only when it comes to aesthetics. The right image has to be optimized for a website, but most people don’t know about it and have no idea how to do it. They just buy some stock photos or add the ones they made.

Photos like that may have excellent quality, but they are also very heavy. That can be the main reason your page started slowing down.

The other problem is the image’s format. Popular formats like PNG, JPG, or GIF are mostly compressed, so they are small and load fast and nicely, but formats like TIFF and BMP will take a lot of time. Be careful what you add.

Your site shouldn’t be slowing down if you have up to 10 images, beyond that, the browser will need some extra time to load them. This is happening because every image must be downloaded and displayed each time you enter a site.

Optimizing Your WordPress

The most significant merit of plugins is speeding up your pages. Most of them won’t slow down your site, only the number of bad ones. According to WpBeginner, plugins gained a bad reputation because of support technicians who were explaining the site’s troubles with having too many of them.

Yes, plugins can slow down your website, but it’s rather about quality than quantity. Dozens of good quality plugins won’t affect your website’s performance, but even one bad apple in the family and the whole site may crush.

Adding a Lazy Loading plugin to your site may improve the user experience. Basically, it allows you to load and render only one section instead of the whole page. On-demand loading reduces time and memory usage, so it optimizes content delivery.

Another useful plugin lets you paginate your page. Having a few pages on your website reduces server load time.  It’s not only useful for optimizing your page but also for creating better user comfort. Most of the time, users aren’t interested in all the data, but only the most recent or interesting content.

Video Gallery

Image adding is something that most WordPress users know how to do, but there is no build-in option for doing this with videos. Having a video gallery can help you display the content quickly and in nice aesthetics. Youtube gallery WordPress plugins may help you to organize and sort content and later, present it in a pretty neat way to users.

These plugins support not only Youtube but a load of other popular video websites including Vimeo. As an admin, you can build whole video channels on your site to increase revenue and content opportunities.

Some plugins offer customizable gallery templates, which are most useful when you are not experienced in creating websites. It’s not easy to choose the right colors, fonts, and layouts without particular skills and talents. Templates provide consistency to your page, so it is nice to look at. Having a template also reduces the time you would have to spend on building it from scratch.

These plugins are a great option when using WordPress. It is good to figure out which options and features would be the best for you and your business.

Conclusion

If your WordPress page is small enough and you have no need for plugins, it’s ok just to use original galleries, but if you want it to grow, it’s best to consider using specialized plugins. Using plugins will be a great help with optimizing your page and boosting performance.