WordPress
According to an article by W3Techs, WordPress now powers 40% of all the websites on the internet. Consequently, there are thousands of different plugins, themes, and technologies that have to exist together. This can easily turn into a nightmare for the average WordPress user who has to troubleshoot their site. Fortunately, we’re here to help.
The following guide will explain some steps you can speed up your WordPress site.
How To Improve the Speed of Your WordPress Site
Select High-Performing WordPress Hosting
A WordPress host is website hosting that is optimized specifically for the platform. Frequently this means that you can install WordPress directly from the host, and the host offers WordPress-specific features and security options.
Server speeds are a huge factor in determining the page loading speed of your website. Therefore, if you want to ensure your WordPress site loads quickly, you must find a trusted web hosting provider. This means that they offer you at least 99.95% uptime and fast page loading speeds. A web host that offers fast page loading speeds will do so using an LS Cache Plugin in most cases. They may also give you a choice of data centers. By choosing your server data center, you can ensure that you get one that’s close to your site visitors. The closer your visitors are to the data center, the faster your website will load for them. Additionally, you will want a web host that uses PHP 7 or higher for the best site performance.
Choose a Fast and Lightweight Theme
New WordPress themes are great, but you should be cautious before grabbing one with all new shiny features. When it comes to performance, every element you see in a theme impacts the overall speed of your WordPress site. Therefore, when choosing a theme, you should either choose one with only the features you need. Alternatively, you can select a theme that gives you the ability to disable features you aren’t going to use.
Some features that weigh down a theme include Google Fonts, Font Awesome icons, sliders, galleries, video, and parallax scripts. Therefore, to improve your site’s speed, you should either disable these features or choose a theme without them.
Only Use Quality Plugins
Contrary to popular belief, the number of plugins you have on your site isn’t as crucial as those plugins’ quality. Similar to themes, it matters how a plugin was developed and if it was created with performance in mind. Therefore, you should research your plugins carefully and only choose ones with precisely the features you want. If they have extra features, you need to be able to disable them. Additionally, you will want to confirm the quality of the plugin. You can do this by looking at:
- The last updated date and active installs will tell you how popular a plugin is.
- The plugin’s ratings and reviews will tell you how well the plugin has worked for other WordPress users.
- The support overview. This will tell you how many issues the plugin has had and how many of them have been left unresolved. This could indicate the plugin is buggy, and the developer is not actively working to fix it.
- A site speed checking site. This will tell you how fast your site performs before and after installing a plugin so you can know whether the plugin is slowing down your site.
Optimize Your Images
Large images cause web pages to load slowly. As a result, your users will have a less than optimal experience. Image optimization is a straightforward thing you can do to improve your overall page load times.
To optimize your images, you need to decrease their file site using either a plugin or script. Alternatively, you could use lossy and lossless compression to reduce your image file sizes.
Conclusion
Slow and steady may win the race in fairytales, but this isn’t the case with the internet. A fast site will help boost your rankings for search engines, improve your conversion rates and decrease your bounce rate. Not to mention that no one likes a slow site, so the faster, the better.
