If your website runs on WordPress, one of the essential things to consider is your website speed. It not only helps you to add some brownies to your user engagement experience but also helps you in ranking your site above your competitor’s websites.
Nowadays, people browse content with their smart phones, hence you should always strive towards loading your content faster than the others. The browsers prefer faster loading of pages for the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings.
So, how are you going to speed up your website? We lay simple tips to load and increase your page views in no time.
Before doing so, you have to understand, what the factors that slow down a website are. The most common ones are large images, conflicting plugins, external scripts, slower web hosts, etc. Slow sites often fail to load the website, and it creates an impression that either the website is dead or it is not trustworthy. Hence it is necessary to address the issue immediately.
Steps to Speed Up Website
1- Optimize the heavy sized images:
Images have become necessary for supporting your content. It also connects the user to the content quickly. But loading your content with images can substantially slow down your website. Many website owners, to serve quality images, upload the large file sized pictures on their site. It burdens the website storage with considerable data size, and it is bound to crawl. Many times it won’t even load on the screen and will not only hurt your website but will also frustrate the user.
To combat that, you need to reduce the file size of the image without deteriorating the quality to the human eye. You can do it with any photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop. There are several free image optimizing plugins available in the WordPress community that can do the job. There are also some online image optimizing sites like resizeimage.net where you can resize images and compress file sizes.
Another way is to use plugins which help in lazy loading the optimized images. There are few WordPress plugins available for that too.
2- Get rid of needless plugins:
Another common factor found in slowing the websites are the unwanted plugins loaded on the site. The owners tend to test or install free plugins and forget about it. Most become incompatible with the latest WordPress updates and conflict in the smoother functioning or processing of the website. Also, the more the plugins, the slower your WordPress site will turn out to be.
You can’t remove every plugin as many of them are useful and some in fact help in speeding your site. In such cases, disable every plugin and check the speed of the loading on Google analytics or external websites like GTmetrix.com. In no time, you will be able to spot the ones which are hampering your speed. If you can’t remove them, try to look out for alternatives that can replace the plug-in without compromising on the performance.
3- Get a good Web Hosting:
Shared hosting is only useful when you are new to the website business. But they are relatively slow in loading and the performance dips during the high traffic period. If your website attracts good traffic, you are compromising a lot on the site speed through shared hosting.
You should then look to invest in good dedicated servers or cloud hosting. You will also secure your website other than speeding up the loading and enhancing the user experience of the site.
4- Avail the use of CDNs:
The CDN’s ( Content Delivery Network) help in providing faster access to your data. Unlike the remote users accessing your site through the single hosting servers, CDNs offer a quicker approach to the content. CDNs help in locating the cached version of your website to the nearest host of the user. Hence, you save on the lag of accessing a remote server time, and the performance of the WordPress site is undeterred.
The chances of crashing of the site are almost negligible through the content delivery networks. The movement of the CDNs is dynamic, and they optimize the speed of content transfer for faster delivery to the consumer.
5- Update your WordPress periodically:
WordPress usually comes up with an update regularly. Often we are lazy to ignore the updates to the latest WordPress version or its patch. But, WordPress usually comes up with fixes to remove the snags that affect the performance of the website.
Always develop a habit of checking for the latest WordPress update. The new ones can come up with security updates, an introduction of a new feature or fixing a bug in the code.
Don’t forget to update the plugins as well from time to time. The updates make your website safe and compatible to latest in the web world. But as a more reliable practice, always keep a data backup of your site with the older version.
6- Use the Browser Caching option:
Another great idea to speed up your website performance is to install a browser cache option on your site. Browser caching creates a cache file which reserves the pages the user has visited in the browser. So, when the visitor revisits the pages, the content is recalled from the cache. It removes the process of reloading a fresh page and thus the content loads quickly.
There are some excellent WordPress plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP super cache which do the job efficiently. WP Rocket is another popular plugin. You can even ask your developer to enable the caching option for you.
7- Avoid Slower Themes:
It is difficult to know how your theme is performing. But if you have done all the above and you find your site still having performance issues, the chances are, it is time to shift to another theme.
It is also common that people often save money on themes and opt for free themes. Free themes are excellent for smaller and simple sites. But, if your content is accumulated significantly over time and supported by a lot of professional plugins and good images, you should always opt for paid themes with a robust framework.
Expensive themes don’t mean they are good; you should do some research on the net, check the reviews of the users and the support they provide before opting for a faster theme. Always try to pick the theme based on your needs. Don’t go for a loaded theme where you don’t avail half of the features it provides.
The above seven easy tips are enough to speed up your website. You will see the results in the ranking too, and the SEO score should also improve significantly with these easy steps.
If you wish to find out more information on WordPress and its tips and tricks, kindly check our exhaustive course on WordPress which you can learn very quickly from the best experts in the industry.
