Best Ways To Optimize Speed Of WordPress Website
Nisa Benli
Table of Contents
Pages that load quickly enhance user experience, boost pageviews, and aid with WordPress SEO, this is why the performance and speed of your website are so important.
We’ll explore some best practices for optimizing the speed of WordPress website in this post and address both queries: What are the best ways to increase the speed of WordPress website? Why is your website loading slowly?
Why Does The Speed of WordPress website Matter?
To find out how well your website is doing, you must assess the speed of the WordPress website.
The Speed of WordPress Website affects SEO
The Google Page Experience change will be beneficial to you if you prioritize giving consumers a quicker and safer experience.
According to Google’s announcement, one of the key factors influencing your page’s rating is how quickly it loads.
The bounce rate is decreased with Fast sites
Your website’s loading speed will undo all the hard work you put into its design and development, even with the finest content and product.
What Causes The Speed of WordPress Website to Slow Down?
Finding out what causes your website to load slowly is essential to enhancing performance and making more informed long-term decisions.
These are the main reasons why a WordPress website loads slowly:
- Web Hosting: An improperly designed web hosting server might negatively impact the performance of your website.
- WordPress Configuration: Your website may become sluggish or break completely if your WordPress site does not display cached content, which will overburden your server.
- Page Size: Mostly un-optimized images for web.
- Bad Plugins: A badly built plugin might cause your website to load far more slowly.
- External Scripts: The functionality of your website can also be significantly impacted by external scripts, such as font loaders and advertisements.
Three Fundamental Steps for Speed Optimization
The simplest methods for increasing the speed of WordPress website are listed below.
Select a strong hosting
The speed of WordPress website is greatly influenced by your hosting provider.
shared hosting
With shared hosting, several other users have access to the server’s resources. It might affect your website if one of them has a spike in visitors.
Dedicated hosting
Under this arrangement, a single server with all of its resources is rented by a hosting company to a single customer. It speeds up loading times and gives you complete control over how you use your server.
Managed WordPress hosting
You may uplift the speed of WordPress website on the best possible server configurations. These businesses include services like security setups, automated WordPress upgrades, and much more.
Utilize a caching plugin to maximize performance
A caching plugin creates a website’s static HTML pages and stores them on your server. Your caching plugin replaces the heavier WordPress PHP scripts with a lighter HTML page each time a user attempts to visit your website.
It seems as though your material is “saved” by the cache plugin, making it load more quickly when someone visits your website.
The speed of WordPress website will be slow, if static resources, such as photos and JavaScript files, are reloaded each time they are requested.
Make use of lazy loading and optimize your images
- You can use three image formats: JPEG, PNG or WebP. You can reduce your image size by up to 5 times, though, depending on the image file type and the compression level you select in your editing program.
- Lessen the weight of them.
- Adjust their dimensions to match the actual size of your pages.
- The LazyLoad will be applied by WP Rocket on pictures, iframes, and videos.
Greatest Techniques for Increasing Speed
Your website will load much more quickly once you optimize your pictures and install a caching plugin.
However, you must adhere to the following recommended practices if you truly want to maintain the fastest possible speed for your website.
Make use of an optimized theme for speed
You may pick from almost an endless variety of themes with WordPress, which is one of its finest features. Don’t limit your consideration to looks and usefulness when choosing which one to utilize.
It’s also crucial that you select a theme with effective performance optimization. High-end WordPress theme stores with fast-loading and well-coded themes include StudioPress, Themify, CSSIgniter, and Astra.
Utilize Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
With a content delivery network (CDN), you may host your website closer to the end user if your target audience is dispersed globally.
A CDN builds a global network of servers that store static data, which results in a much faster speed of WordPress website under various conditions, as opposed to having everything coming from a single server in one place.
Keep Your WordPress Website Updated
Every update will address bugs and security vulnerabilities in addition to adding new features.
Regular updates may also be available for your WordPress theme and plugins. It is your duty as a website owner to maintain the most recent versions of your WordPress theme, plugins, and website.
Never Upload Video or Audio Files directly to WordPress
Hosting massive media assets also greatly expands the size of your backups and complicates the process of restoring WordPress from backup.
Use an audio and video hosting service, such as Vimeo, DailyMotion, SoundCloud, YouTube, etc., and let them handle the labour-intensive stuff instead. They’re able to handle the bandwidth!
With WordPress, embedding videos is as simple as copying and pasting the URL of your video into your article; WordPress will take care of the rest.
Make Use of Faster Plugins
WP plugins with bad coding frequently load excessive amounts of bloat, whether or not your website needs them. This causes your site to slow down.
Here are a few of our top choices for the most popular WordPress plugin categories.
- WPForms: It is the fastest and most user-friendly WordPress contact form plugin.
- All-in-One SEO: An effective WordPress SEO plugin that prioritizes website performance to help you rank better in search results.
- WordPress plugin MonsterInsights: It is the best for Google Analytics without causing your site to load slowly.
- Shared Counts: This WordPress social media plugin is among the quickest available.
Break lengthy articles Into separate pages
Longer, more in-depth blog entries are usually highly appreciated by readers.
However, your loading speeds may suffer if you post lengthy content with plenty of photographs. Rather, think about dividing your lengthy posts into several pages by just adding the <!––next page––> tag to the appropriate page.
Minify JavaScript
Minification is the act of eliminating redundant and useless code without influencing the way the browser handles the data. JavaScript minification eliminates any superfluous JavaScript material, including:
“(//…)” and all of the superfluous whitespace, or removes code comments. Put another way, the objective is to drastically reduce the code size to make the file significantly lighter.
Minify CSS
You can find punctuation, comments, and whitespace in a CSS file. Although the visitor doesn’t need it, this material aids the developer in better understanding the code.
You’ll obtain lighter files by removing superfluous material since CSS minification eliminates whitespaces and unneeded spaces and comments from your CSS files, such as “(/*”).
Optimize your WordPress database and minimize database calls
Your WordPress database will expand along with your website as it expands, eventually rendering some of your data outdated. Your database will work more effectively and load quicker if you can remove the data that is no longer required.
Before you can optimize your database, you must first log into PHPMyAdmin through your hosting company.
Resolve SSL/HTTPS Errors Without Plugins
You may see mixed content errors if you migrate your website to HTTPS/SSL. To address this, using a plugin such as Really Simple SSL is the simplest solution.
The issue with these plugins, though, is that they intercept all URLs before converting them to HTTPS and delivering them to users’ browsers.
Conclusion
You ought to make every effort to maximize the speed of WordPress website. It’s one of those infrastructure elements that significantly alters who views and interprets your work.
Luckily, you may quickly see amazing results by utilizing some of these best practices.
One of the simplest methods to raise the speed of WordPress website, among other tools, is to use WP Rocket.
