As a WordPress user, there are two particular things you should pay close attention to; speed and security. If you’re not concerned with these, you should be. They could end up being extremely costly not just down the road, but right now. Don’t believe me? Consider the stats below:

Lost Revenue From A Slow Website

Consider these staggering speed stats from Kissmetrics:

• 47% of site visitors expect a site to load in 2-seconds or less
• 46% of visitors would abandon a site if it takes anywhere between 1-10 seconds to load
• A 1-second delay in page load can result in 7% less conversions

These stats don’t even include the impact that a slow loading site will have on your bounce rate and SEO rankings. It doesn’t matter if you’re an eCommerce site or earn money from ad revenue. What you care about most is your bottom line.

What’s the bottom line? If your site makes $1000/day and you convert 7% less because of a 1-second page load delay, that will end up costing you over $25,000/yr.

Losing Money Running An Insecure Website

You may be surprised how much a slow website could be costing your bottom line. You may be just as surprised as how much an insecure site can cost!

• According to this Sucuri study, “Google currently blacklists close to 20,000 websites a week for malware and another ~50,000 a week for phishing”. If you’re like an average site, 50% of your traffic comes from Google organic search. Can you afford to be blacklisted because of a hacked site?

How much does a hacked site cost to fix? According to varying estimates, the average cost will be about $2500. Of course that varies with the complexity of the site as well as the type and severity of the incurred damage.  That doesn’t even include the potential costs to the reputation and price to get the blacklisted status removed.

What’s The Solution?

We don’t mean to make you panic. Rather we just want to make sure you’re aware of these potential issues. What we certainly don’t recommend you doing is installing a bunch of random speed and security plugins. Doing this can actually slow down your site and make it less secure because of a number of conflicts and potential vulnerabilities. Instead we recommend adding just one WordPress plugin to your site, A2 Optimized.

The developers of A2 Optimized tested a number of configurations to determine those that get you the best speed and security settings. Essentially their work has taken the guesswork out of optimizing your site. Just add and activate this free plugin within your WordPress interface to get a number of key speed and security optimizations including:

Speed Features:

• Easy W3 Cache Configuration
• Minify HTML
• Minify CSS
• Minify JS
• Gzip Compression

Security Features:

• Hardens .htaccess rules to block browsers from your crucial files
• Blocks bots from comment forms
• Prevents plugins and themes from being tampered with in wp-admin

The Bottom Line

A2 Optimized is 100% free and will work regardless of where you host your site. However we recommend choosing A2 Hosting and their WordPress Hosting services for a few reasons. The first is that your account will feature WordPress pre-installed with A2 Optimized. You won’t even have to install A2 Optimized on your account. Secondly, there are a number of additional A2 Optimized features that are unlocked when hosted with A2 Hosting. These include security features like changing your login URL for enhanced security as well the ability to host on their Turbo Servers featuring up to 20X faster page loads compared to competing hosts.

Try out A2 Optimized now on your WordPress site and let us know what you think of it in the comments below.