Majority of websites these days are built on WordPress because it offers the admin the ease of handling the website and make changes as and when required. Still, businesses aim at speeding up WordPress, and luckily, there are numerous techniques that they can use. When the WordPress will work faster, search engines like Google give such website benefit by improving their SERPs, which is a great boon for any organization working hard to boost their social media and search engine presence. Furthermore, it also reduces visitors bounce off rate as the website will load faster, keeping the visitor hooked. If yours is an e-commerce website, then it is more than imperative that the website must load at the earliest otherwise your buyers will move onto the next fast loading site. Before such a thing happens to you, take a look at the top seven ways that can optimize WordPress website speed & performance.
How to Speed up Your WordPress Site
- The very first thing you need to do in order to influence the speed of your website is to choose a better web hosting provider. If your website is on a shared hosting provider, it will lack good loading times on peak traffic hours. This happens because your server space is being used by countless other websites. So, it is better to have an independent hosting provider to stay on top of loading times.
- No matter how much you like certain WordPress themes and framework, it is smarter to stick with those which are lightweight, meaning there are lesser elements and smaller page sizes. A heavy theme will make your site slower whereas a lightweight theme will ensure that it takes the least amount of loading time.
- Visually rich website will definitely attract a lot of visitors; however, if the image size is big, it will cause trouble in loading time. This doesn’t mean that you have to succumb on quality as you can simply reduce the size of the image and improve the speed of your website.
- Websites that run through Google PageSpeed Insights tool are often notified about minimizing the size of CSS and JS files. When the size of these files is reduced, it allows the website to run faster with improved site-loading speed. If you know your way around WordPress, you can also do some manual fixing.
- Websites are visited by people spread all around the world and the site will load slower if the visitors are located far away from where your site is hosted CDN (Content Delivery Networks) helps a website’s loading speed to a minimum for visitors from various countries. The copy of the website is kept in various data centers located in different places, thus allowing for faster loading times.
- Many times a lot of unwanted plugins are connected with the WordPress site, adding a tremendous amount of junk to your web files that slow the website down. If you aren’t using certain plugins, it is better to get rid of them. This simple act will boost the speed and performance of your website.
- A big chunk of data adds to the website with the usage of external scripts on web pages. So make sure you limit the number of scripts and include only the essentials like tracking tools (like Google Analytics) or commenting systems (like Disqus).
