WordPress is a great platform for clean and well-designed code, but it’s not perfect. Purchase hosting, get a domain name, and install WordPress is simple. With so many great themes and plugins available for WordPress users, you can easily build and designed a website and filled it with content in a few hours.
Slow themes and plugins can make your website difficult to use. Combine that with a web host which is not perfect, and you’re in big trouble. However, there are literally hundreds of possible ways that you can speed up your WordPress website.
Because page loading speed influences everything from traffic to bounce rate to conversions, user satisfaction, and profits, it is better to give priority to boost the website performance.
Therefore, here are few easiest tips to speed up your WordPress site.
What Slows Down Your WordPress Website?
- Web Hosting
- WordPress Configuration
- Page Size
- Bad Plugins
- External scripts (ads, font loaders)
Why Website Speed Matters?
- Slow Speed Leads to Lost Visitors
- Speed is a Ranking Factor on Google/Bing/Yahoo
Tips to Speed up your WordPress site.
- Invest in Quality Hosting
The major factor that influences the speed of a website is the hosting of your WordPress website. You can host your new website on a shared hosting provider that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, space, emails, domains and more. However, that shared hosting environments fail to deliver good loading times on peak traffic hours, and most fail to provide 99 percent uptime in any given month.
Therefore it is better to choose a good quality hosting provider before purchasing.
- Keep Your Web Technology Up to Date
New versions of HTML, PHP, and other web technologies come out for a reason. They contain improvements, new features, and improved speed. For that reason, it’s important to stay up to date.
All websites should be running at least PHP 7.2 now since it is the oldest version that still receives security updates. When you log into your hosting backend, make sure to look for a PHP configuration or a similar menu item. Here, you can often control which version of PHP you are using.
- Use the Latest Versions of WordPress and Its Components
Keeping your website up to date is not only speed but also a security issue. With the latest version of WordPress, your themes and plugins will be updated. You can also make sure all known vulnerabilities are fixed. Nothing will slow you down more than a compromised website.
- Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks are two core WordPress components that alert you whenever your blog or page receives a link. It might be useful, but there are some Google Webmaster Tools and other services to check the links of your website. Keeping pingbacks and trackbacks on can also put an undesirable amount of strain on your server resources. Therefore, disable pingbacks and trackbacks will help you speed up WordPress some more.
- Clean-up WordPress database
Deleting unwanted data from your database will keep its size to a minimum and also helps to reduce the size of your backups. It is also necessary to delete spam comments, fake users, old drafts of your content and even unwanted themes. All of this will reduce the size of your databases and web files.
- Use a CDN
There are many CDN (Content Delivery Networks) that help to keep the site-loading speed to a minimum for visitors from various countries. A CDN keeps a copy of your website in various data centres located in different places. The primary function of a CDN is to serve the webpage to a visitor from the nearest possible location. This helps to load the website fast in any area close to CDN.
- Optimize Images
Images are the major contributors to size increment of a given webpage. You can reduce the size of the images without compromising on the quality. If you manually optimize the images using Photoshop or any other tools, the process will take a long time.
Instead of manually optimizing you can use a plugin for this. If you prefer a free plugin then you can try WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimization. Both plugins will compress images you upload to your site. Using these plugins will reduce image sizes and improving the speed of your website.
- Avoid Hosting Videos on Your Own Site
While WordPress is perfectly capable of hosting and playing videos, doing so is not a good idea. It costs you bandwidth and it will make your WordPress site considerably larger and harder to back up.
Therefore, it is better to use video hosting sites that can probably do a much better job than your own server can do.
- Enable Page Caching
Page caching is one of the best ways to decrease the page loading time of your WordPress website. There are several premium all-in-one caching plugins for doing this in case you want to support.
You can also implement caching yourself via .htaccess. In addition to that, there’s also server-side page caching. To do that, you can talk to your host. Many managed WordPress hosting providers now offer their own caching solutions so you don’t have to do anything.
- Use Excerpts on Homepage and Archives
By default, WordPress displays the full content of each article on your homepage and archives. This means your homepage, categories, tags, and other archive pages will all load slower. In order to speed up your loading times for archive pages, you can set your site to display excerpts instead of the full content.
- Split Long Posts into Pages
Readers tend to love blog posts that are longer and more in-depth. Longer posts even tend to rank higher in search engines. But if you’re publishing long-form articles with lots of images, it could be hurting your loading times. Instead, consider splitting up your longer posts into multiple pages.
- Reduce External HTTP Requests
Many WordPress plugins and themes load all kinds of files from other websites. These files can include scripts, stylesheets, and images from external resources like Google, Facebook, analytics services, and so on.
It’s ok to use a few of these. Many of these files are optimized to load as quickly as possible, so it’s faster than hosting them on your own website.
But if your plugins are making a lot of these requests, then it could slow down your website significantly. You can reduce all these external HTTP requests by disabling scripts and styles or merging them into one file.
- Do a Plugin Check and Remove Inactive Plugins
If you are using more than 15 plugins on your blog then you need to check, if you really need all of those. If you don’t then you need to delete them. Also remove the inactive plugins from the site. While checking for plugins, make sure that you use the proper format when including the plugin in your template files.
Summary
Everyone loves visiting a fast website. Website speed is now the critical factor in search engine positioning algorithm. You can lose your potential visitor due to the slow pace of a website.
Having a fast site helps boost your rankings, improves crawlability for search engines, improves conversion rates, increases time on site, and decreases your bounce rate. Furthermore, it will also improve your rankings in the SERPs.