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Proven Ways To Speed Up Your WordPress Site
If you want to create the best and most successful WordPress website for your clients or for yourself, it’s important to learn how to boost the speed of your WordPress site. Several people focus on the design and some on the content of a website; how quickly that website load is just as important, if not more. Load times will affect your site’s user experience, SEO rankings, conversion rates, bounce rates, and more. Understanding all the pros of WordPress performance can be complicated, which is why we’ve created this blog on how to boost the speed of your WordPress site. In this blog, we’ll be covering the topics you need to know. We’ll start explaining the proven ways, why speed is important, and how to test your site’s current performance.
WHY IS YOUR WORDPRESS SITE SLOW?
There are two types of categories of issues that could be slowing your WordPress site down-
- Backend Performance- In broad terms, this is how long it takes your server to deliver files.
- Frontend Performance- This is how optimized your WordPress site itself is.
Backend performance problems generally come from your hosting. In case, using slow hosting is one of the biggest culprits of poor backend performance. You can also speed up backend performance. You can speed up backend performance by making your server more efficient with tactics such as page caching, using the latest version of PHP, optimizing your database and more.
Frontend performance problems will depend a lot more on the choice you make when building your WordPress site. Some common issues include-
- Loading too many third-party scripts
- Loading large, unoptimized images
- Using too many poorly-optimized WordPress plugins
- Using a heavy WordPress theme
- Having unoptimized JavaScript or CSS
If you want to increase your site’s performance, you need to optimize both types of performance. Even a site with perfect frontend optimization might still load slowly if it’s on really slow hosting (and Vice Versa).
WHY SHOULD YOU SPEED UP WORDPRESS?
There are several reasons that speed up the site, some of which might even cause major concerns for you-
- Search engines will rank websites with fast-loading times higher than the slow-loading ones. If you want to improve your position in the SERPs, improving your speed should be your topmost priority.
- Studies have shown that a site-loading speed of more than 2 seconds will result in visitors leaving your website. To keep your customers engaged with you or grab their interest, you should speed up your WordPress.
- Online buyers don’t have patience- they expect the page to load within a second. So in case if you’re running an e-commerce store on WordPress, then you better get ready to make major improvements so your business can be more profitable.
WHY WORDPRESS SITE SPEED MATTERS
When a person looks at your site for the very first time, you only have a few seconds to make them impress them or convince them about the product or services you’re selling. According to a Microsoft Bing search team report, a 2-second delay in a page will reduce user satisfaction by 3.8%, increase lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and reduce clicks by 4.3%. If your site takes too much time to load, most people are gone, lost before you even had a chance. Not only that, but Google now includes site speed in its ranking algorithm. That means that your site’s speed affects SEO, so if your site is slow, you’re losing buyers/visitors from impatience and reduced ranking in search engines.
HOW TO TEST THE LOADING TIME OF YOUR WEBSITE?
The main thing you’ve to do first is to analyze the current load time for your website. Keep in mind that this speed may differ from page to page, as it depends on numerous factors, including-
- The size of that particular page
- Whether it’s cached or not
- How many requests does it generate
- What kind of content does it host
The homepage of a website is usually used as a standard to test the load time. To check the speed of a website, the following three tools are used extensively across the web-
Okay, now it’s time to jump to How To Speed Up WordPress Site?
How To Speed Up WordPress Site?
Ask Your Cloud Hosting Provider
Source: PC
Before making any decision, it’s recommended to ask your WordPress managed hosting provider for their compatibility with WordPress. They’ll suggest some tips and ideas on how to make your WordPress site faster. This will definitely help you with WordPress Speed Optimization efficiently and save your time. When you’re visiting a website, you’re basically accessing files from a computer, i.e. probably a hundred or thousands of miles away from you. That server has to complete tasks such as executing code, running database queries, and serving files for your web page to load. A dedicated server is quicker because the resources are not shared among other websites, which means you get optimum performance any time of the day. A dedicated server can speed up your WordPress site because you get the server all to yourself.
Install an Effective Caching Plugin
Source: themeum
One of the most important and popular ways to increase the speed of your website is using a cache plugin. A caching plugin will store the final view of your site for any future visitors. Your WordPress won’t generate it for every following person viewing the site. This also includes HTML, JS, and CSS code, Fonts, Flash files, and Images.
Before choosing and installing a plugin yourself, ask your hosting provider if they prefer a particular caching plugin.
Look For Inactive Plugin Or For Plugins That Don’t Work Properly
Source: wpbeginner
Another way to increase your WordPress website is by verifying if your current plugins are working correctly. Plugins and tools can sometimes cause lag in your website, rendering it slow to load. If you find plugins that slow down your website, remove them or try to find other performance plugins for your WordPress site. Make sure you keep a large number of active plugins to affect your WordPress site speed.
Compress Media Files
Source: WINZIP
Uploading large images and videos will significantly slow your website. For this there’s a solution to speed up a WordPress site is to compress your media files. There are free plugins for WordPress that automatically reduce all your image dimensions, so there will be no need to do this for each picture. In simple words, smaller files will allow your pages to load faster, and compressed images and media are good for WordPress speed optimization.
Optimize Your WordPress Site’s Homepage
Source: Etalktech
Another important thing that can increase your WordPress site is to optimize your homepage. Make it look simple without gathering content and useless tools and widgets. Don’t show the posts at their full length. You can show only the first paragraph; you can add the button like read more or view more. Displaying too many posts on the same page could cause a longer loading time as well.
Update And Update
Source: Windowsreport
Keep your WordPress updated at all times. Whether it’s a plugin or a theme, keep in mind that they stay up to date at all times. If something new is available in the market, try to test each update before applying it on a live site.
Disable Hotlinking
Source: CLOUDWAYS
Hotlinking is a term used when one website uses another’s resources. For example, if someone copied an image from your site, it loads the image from your website once his website is loaded. This means that it is consuming bandwidth and resources from your server.
Use Light Weight Theme
Source: wpforms
There are many shiny and beautiful themes in the WordPress market. But don’t forget, themes with a lot of dynamic content, widgets, slider, sidebar etc., can cause your hosting server to respond slowly. Always optimize your WordPress theme or use a lightweight WordPress theme. The default WordPress themes can be enough if you want to run a blogging website.
Remove Useless Widgets & Social Sharing Buttons
Source: superuser
WordPress users get carried away When it comes to widgets. Users feel like they should install as many as possible to make their website more functional, not knowing that these widgets come at a cost apart from their price. Widgets tend to bulk up your website, resulting in sluggish load times as it generates an important number of requests on the front end. The best solution to increase your speed in WordPress websites is to keep your widgets to a minimum and use just your website needs.
Optimize The WordPress Database
Source: CLOUDWAYS
For WordPress speed optimization, you need to optimize your WordPress database. Your computer’s hard drive, your WordPress database gets filled with junk that you don’t need. An unoptimized or unsettled WordPress database always slows down your website. The best solution for that is to clean it up from time to time. You can use a database optimization plugin to clean your WordPress database, or you can manually free up your database from garbage that you don’t need to speed up your WordPress website.
Adding Google Fonts
WordPress users use Google Fonts for their website because of its extensive library. It is hosted separately on a different server, which significantly reduces the load on the server. Google Fonts is the best way to hike up your website; you should know how to make the most of it to speed up your WordPress website. You need to ensure that you pre-load the Google Fonts to optimize your website for speed. It has always been told that you host your Google Fonts locally, which means downloading the fonts file onto your local system. Use as few font variants as possible because the more font variants you use, the longer it takes for them to download.
Lazy Load Images
Source: Ionic
Lazy loading is an old technique for WordPress speed optimization, where the images are loaded as the user scrolls down the page. The idea doesn’t load all the page elements at once as it puts stress on the server resulting in slower load times. Rather it loads images when the user reaches the part of the page where the image is placed.
Conclusion
These are a few solutions you can implement for improving the speed of the WordPress site. If you’d like to read more blogs on WordPress, check out our website.
