When it comes to website speed, a lot of webmasters whether WordPress users or not, wonder if it is really important and should be consistently maintained to provide a great user experience. It has a huge impact on users experience that about 40% of internet users abandon websites that loads in more than 3 seconds.
While these days where more and more people are trading online. All webmasters must understand how imperative speed is for overall great user experience. In fact, it is also crucial for to rank at the top in search engine rankings.
In today’s post we have listed 10 easy tips and methods that will help you to speed up your WordPress site:
You must test the current speed of your WordPress site before you start optimizing its speed. The most popular ways adopted for doing it are –
If you really want to have a top-level site, then make it your priority to choose a good Hosting provider. It is imperative, especially if you are running an e-commerce website that uses various content like infographics or videos. It is best to choose quality managed WordPress hosting. However, choose according to your own individual requirements. Here are some of the factors you must consider while choosing a hosting provider –
Nowadays there are a number of awesome WordPress themes to choose from. However, sometimes the theme may be poorly coded and its looks may not equate its performance. So, choose a theme with good speed test scores. Also, if the developer are not sure about what they are doing, then even a simple blogging theme can slow down the loading of your website.
If there are too many plugins on your site, then it can slow down its performance. However, it is going to depend on the size of the plugins and whether or not they are compatible with each other in terms of functionality.
While choosing plugins, always focus on their quality instead of quantity and make sure to update them on a regular basis. You can test your websites speed to manage plugins, choose plugins with multiple functions or use a plugin performance profiler.
Enabling WordPress caching is one of the sure-fire ways to speed up your website. It can increase the loading speed of a site significantly regardless of whether you are using a shared hosting service. Instead of making database calls and executing PHP, it will present a static copy of your website. However, you can use cache plugins such as WP Super Cache and WP Total Cache to increase the caching level of other WordPress.
Basically, CDN is the direct link of your website network all over the world that caches your site’s static content. For example, JavaScript and CSS files are usually stored on several servers as cached copies. So, whenever a user will click on your website, the network that is closest to the user’s geographical location will retrieve the content and deliver it immediately. And, since it decreases the distance between the server and the endpoint machine, it reduces the latency and speedily provide the content to your users.
Generally, PHP is a scripting language that is helpful to build up dynamic interactive sites like WordPress. Of course, it may or may not be your choice to upgrade your PHP version. But you should check with your service hosting provider if your server is being regularly upgraded or not. PHP executes the WordPress codes and generate web pages. Consequently, PHP version has a great impact on a website’s performance.
Another effective way to minimise the loading time of a website is to optimize your images. You can better compress or save the image as a progressive JPG, while uploading it to your WordPress website. Other than this, you can also resize or crop it with the help of a basic photo editing software, shrink the uploaded images by optimizing them with the help of plugins like WP Smush, Ewww image optimizer.
Once you have enjoyed using your WordPress site, your database will contain unnecessary or duplicate data which must be cleaned up to enhance the loading speed of the site. It is best to use an automatic backup process, as removing all this data can minimise the space on your database.
Usually, when other sites mention your website and when you approve it after receiving the notification the data is automatically updated to your post. This can result is adding up unnecessary links to your site and reduce its performance. So, it is important to disable the notifications on pingbacks and trackbacks that WordPress generally sends to and receive from other websites. In order to stop such notifications, simply go to the dashboard, then click on settings > Discussion and then uncheck the option “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) “.
