Are you looking for tips that can help you speed up your WordPress website? It is well-known that fast-loading can improve user experience, increase traffic and improve your position in Search engine Pages (SERP).
If you want to boost the performance of your WP site, you will first need to learn more about the current loading time of your website. Keep in mind that speed results may vary from page to page because not all the pages have the same size, it depends on whether it’s cached or not, how many requests it generates, and what kind of content it hosts.
The homepage is usually used as a benchmark when testing page speed time, and you can use the WebPageTest.org or Tools.Pingdom.com for your test.
This will help you have a clear image of before and after results, and how the tips we provided helped you improve the performance of your WP site.
Let’s see what are the steps you should take next:
1. Choose a Better Hosting Provider
Your WP hosting service plays an important role in your overall website performance. Although shared hosting provider might seem like a great idea, it can deliver poorer performance because you are sharing the same server space with countless other websites.
Luckily, you can buy dedicated cloud servers from DigitalOcean, SiteGround, Amazon Web Services, and others for a reasonable price, but you will have to set them yourself. They will need to be set from scratch, and that might be a bit complicated, so we suggest you use professional service that some web hosting providers offer.
2. Use a Lightweight WordPress Theme
There are numerous options and designs among WordPress themes. They include different dynamic elements, sliders, social icons and other widgets which makes them more appealing. Although it is hard to resist all those fancy elements, don’t forget that they will increase the size of your pages and slow down your site.
The best option is to use fast themes, such as the WordPress’ default ones. Also, keep in mind that the design must be responsive and that your website should look and work well on any device.
3. Reduce Image Sizes
Large images slow down your website, which can cause bad user experience. You will need to resize images and make them smaller without ruining their quality. You can do that by decreasing the file size of the images using the plugin like WP Smush, EWWW Optimize or a script. That will help you improve the loading speed of your website.
4. Install a Caching Plugin
WordPress pages are dynamic, which means they are built on the fly every time someone visits a post on your website. This process includes a lot of steps and it can slow down your website a lot, especially when you have several people visiting at the same time.
Caching can make your website up to 5x times faster, and a faster website will bring you more organic traffic since it will rank better in search results. There are many WordPress Caching Plugins, and companies like Bluehost and SiteGround offer caching solutions, too.
5. Deactivate or Uninstall Plugins You Don’t Need
If you want to avoid a huge amount of junk at your web files, don’t forget to remove unwanted plugins from your WordPress website. All you have to do is check which plugins you don’t use anymore from time to time, so you can get rid of them, and you can also look for alternative methods to use third-party services for automating or scheduling some tasks, such as sharing your content to social media channels. Zapier and IFTTT are those kinds of web services which can be used for scheduling posts, and which will save you a lot of server resources.
If you haven’t started improving the performance of your WP website, you can start now, and use the valuable tips we shared with you. In case you have trouble staying on track and need assistance, Summit Digital webmasters will be there to ensure your WordPress website reaches its full potential!
