Whether you use your WordPress website as an eСommerce business or to publish content, you want site visitors to stay on your site and become regular customers or readers.

In the age of AMP and short attention spans, delivering experiences quickly is key. Instagram is a key marketing channel for thousands of brands yet all WP plugins we’ve tested lag like 28.8 in Duke Nukem 3D.

We built a truly free plugin for WP devs that fixes that.

The Problem with Slow Websites

As a WordPress site owner or administrator, you understand the value of site speed, both to SEO and the user experience. People hype pagespeed as an SEO ranking factor, as if it’s absolute. What they’re missing is that it’s not the score, it’s the number of people staying on your site longer and not bouncing back to the Google results because your site is slow to load.

page-speed-instagram-wp

After all, a site that’s faster means better SEO simply because organic traffic that finds your site from Google won’t leave right away because your site doesn’t take forever to load. And when more people find and stay on your site longer…your search ranking goes up, so it’s a win-  win all around!

Research Supports the Need for More Speed

Studies also demonstrate the endless value of having a fast site. This is applicable to both desktop and mobile sites.

For example, this infographic makes clear that 83% of today’s users expect sites to load in 3 or fewer seconds and that decreasing load times on both retail and political sites always leads to dramatically greater conversions. On mobile, one case study found that mobile pages with a 1-second increase in speed get up to 27% more conversions.

Clearly, you need a faster WordPress site, and we have just the tool for that!

Introducing the Optimized Instagram Plugin

We built this plugin specifically to make sites faster. We optimize WordPress sites for clients and got tired of Instagram feeds impacted load times, we wanted to make it easier for WordPress professionals to eliminate this problem entirely.

wp-instaagram-optimized-example

Optimized Instagram, is a free widget designed to optimize images for better performance. Optimized Instagram:

  • Pulls Instagram images
  • Creates and optimizes user-specified, exact-size thumbnails
  • Serves the images locally from a subdirectory within your site’s WP content/uploads

The results are:

  • A faster site
  • Image optimization
  • Increasing Google page speed test scores

optimized-instagram-settings

Our plugin differs from previously available Instagram plugins by being developer-friendly, lightweight and easy to style with just basic CSS experience. Other Instagram plugins would serve images straight from Instagram’s servers, thereby restricting control over thumbnail sizes, image optimization, and caching. Everything on a site ended up slowing down.

So try our Instagram plugin today. You don’t need the Instagram API, you don’t have to give us your email, and it’s free to use however you’d like.

About Kyle Sanders

Kyle Sanders is Head of Search at CWR SEO, a marketing and development agency based in Austin, TX. Connect with him directly through CWR or on Twitter.