Improving the pace of your website is the thing you can think most about during a technical audit. Consumers typically tend to visit pages with the faster page loading speed, and several online resources provide comprehensive insights into your website’s speed performance.
Increasing a site’s speed starts with your Web hosting for WordPress. It’s not very different from the process used to optimize a website hosted on a shared server or a dedicated one.
With this short guide, we’ll cover all the best ways to boost WordPress speed consistently.
Why should you speed up WordPress?
- Search engines (like Google) rate websites higher with fast-loading times. So, if you want to improve your rank within the SERPs, one of your goals should be to decrease your server response time.
- Studies have shown that more than 2 seconds of site-loading speed usually results in about 47 percent of visitors bouncing off the website. So, it would be best to speed up your WordPress to keep around half of your visitors interested.
- The most impatient lot is online buyers; they expect the page to load in a second. So, if you run an e-commerce store on WordPress, then you’d better be prepared to make significant improvements to make your business more profitable.
How to check the website’s loading time?
First things first, you have to analyze your website’s current load time. Please remember that this speed may vary from page to page, depending on different factors, namely:
- The size of a given page,
- How many requests it makes,
- Whether it is cached or not
- And lastly, what kind of (static or dynamic) content it hosts.
Choose a better web hosting provider.
The main factor affecting a website’s speed is the hosting of the WordPress website. Hosting your new website on a shared hosting provider that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, space, emails, domains, and more might seem like a good idea. The point we typically miss about this bid, however, is that Shared hosting environments do not deliver good loading times over peak traffic hours, and most fail to deliver an uptime of 99 percent in any given month.
Cloud hosting appears to offer lower efficiency as you share the same server space with numerous other websites, and there is no idea of how often other people use it. Plus, you don’t know how well the servers are being optimized. Fortunately, technology has progressed in the web hosting industry, and cloud hosting providers’ costs have dropped over time.
Use a lightweight WordPress theme/framework
WordPress themes are incredibly pleasing to the eye with lots of interactive elements, sliders, buttons, social icons, and many more shiny elements. But note this: if they have too many features and larger page sizes, they will undoubtedly cause a thumping on your web server. The usage of lightweight themes is the best choice here. One option is to go for one of WordPress’s default themes.
Reduce image sizes
Images are the major contributors to a given web page’s increment in size. The trick is to lower the image size without compromising on the quality. If you edit the images manually using the Chrome PageSpeed Insights extension or Photoshop or any other software, it will take a very long time to do so.
Minify JS and CSS files
If you use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to run your website, you’ll probably be notified of minimizing the size of your CSS and JS files. It means that you can improve Site loading speed by minifying the JS and CSS files.
Using caching plugins
WordPress caching plugins have been around for a long time, making it easier to add caching rules to your website’s elements. Combining these plugins with advanced caching mechanisms such as Varnish could help you increase your website’s loading speed.
Use a CDN
The people who visit the website are located at various places around the world, and needless to say, the loading speed can vary if the users are far from where your site is hosted. There are several CDN (Content Delivery Networks) that helps to keep the loading time low of your website for visitors from different countries. A CDN can hold a copy of the website’s website at various data centers located in different locations. A CDN’s primary purpose is to represent a visitor to the webpage from the nearest place possible. One of the most common CDN services is Cloud flare and MaxCDN.
Enable GZIP compression
Compressing files on your local machine will save a significant amount of disk space. Likewise, we can use GZIP compression for the web. This technique significantly decreases the usage of the bandwidth and the time it takes to access your website. GZIP compresses different files to unzip the website first when a visitor wants to access your website. This process considerably reduces the use of the bandwidth.
Cleanup WordPress database
Deleting unused data from your servers can decrease its size and also helps to reduce the size of your backups. Spam messages, bogus users, old versions of your content, and maybe even unwanted plugins and themes needs to be removed. All this would reduce the scale of your databases and web files, thus speed up your website.
Deactivate or uninstall plugins
Unused plugins will bring a large volume of junk to your web files. Besides, it will also increase your backup size and put an enormous amount of load on your server resources while backup files are being made. It’s safer to get rid of the plugins you don’t need and search for new ways to use third-party providers to automate or schedule tasks.
Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks are two core components of WordPress, which alerts you whenever your blog or page gets a link. Holding pingbacks and trackbacks can also bring undue pressure on your server resources. This is so because it creates WordPress requests back and forth if someone wants to connect up to your account. This feature is often commonly misused while performing DDoS attacks on a website.
Conclusion
The most significant advantage of reducing the loading time for your website is that it will significantly improve visitors’ experience. Whether they use mobile devices or PCs, the case remains the same. Besides, it’ll also improve your SERP rankings. So, if you also want assistance to reduce visitor bounce rate by enhancing your website’s server response time, WordPress Experts and WordPress Speed optimization is the perfect destination you are looking for.
