WordPress is the most popular and chosen website-building platform for most businesses and brands that want to create their digital footprint. The major concern of site owners is that WordPress does not focus on speed but also cares about the site structure to make it easier for the web server to load all the elements together.
The performance of your website’s page is an important ranking factor apart from the other variables. If the web page performance lags, it automatically pulls down the webpage rank. Especially, the loading speed of your website highly affects user engagement and experience overall. Search engines give top ranks to those websites which do not take more than two seconds to load.
So let’s focus on how to optimize your WordPress website with a few simple tricks and tips at hand.
10 Easy Tips For WordPress Website Speed Optimization
You need to approach the best WordPress developers and implement these ways to optimize your WordPress website’s performance. There are multiple active plans of action that you can take to help you nurture the website’s speed and gain more traffic. Additionally, it will make your WordPress website more reliable and credible in the digital world.
Dive in and learn about these various technical and non-technical ways of optimizing your WordPress website’s speed.
Select A Reliable & High-Quality Hosting Service
A reliable and high-quality hosting service is one of the primary bricks that help to improve the website’s speed. You need to check in with your web hosting provider whether all your requirements will be taken into consideration, and whether the servers can take the load. Ensure that your hosting provider offers the required bandwidth and performance standards.
There are different hosting plans available as below, and you can choose whatever is suitable for your WordPress website functions.
- Shared Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting
- Managed WordPress Hosting Plans
Dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, and managed-to-host plans offer a better deal than shared hosting plans.
Dedicated, VPS and managed hosting can regulate traffic surges, have higher bandwidth, and allocate enough server resources to prevent any lag in the load time.
Whereas, remember that in shared hosting plans, when too many requests are received from different websites all at a time, the server may lose its momentum. You may receive slow results as other websites also share the same server.
Use a CDN to deliver your site’s large files
Content Delivery Network or CDN is a very effective worldwide tactic adopted by SEO experts as well as WordPress website development service providers. This is so because it helps in distributing the load on the server when the real-life distance is huge between the web browser and the server. This server pool is globally connected, enhancing the speed and reducing the load.
A CDN is a global interconnection of servers creating a server pool. So whenever any user requests data, the nearest server processes the request and showcases the results. This significantly reduces the load on the server and network latency. Additionally, the website speed is not hampered as it takes a few seconds to load.
Your hosting service provider takes this into account and offers fast content delivery. Moreover, it also helps to distribute the traffic surge by smoothly segregating the load, as discussed above.
Install Performance-Friendly & High-Quality Plugins
Ensure the WordPress plugins are of high quality and effective for your business requirement before downloading them. Most plugins have heavy coding that consumes the server’s resources whenever they need. Unnecessary installation of plugins for your WordPress website will only pull down your site’s speed and performance. So poor-quality plugins must be eliminated from your list.
Select and install such plugins that have a lighter code and are performance and speed-friendly. Check out reviews and feedback from trusted sources and run a speed test before and after installing them. If the disparity is more then avoid such plugins.
If you select lightweight and performance-friendly plugins for your WordPress website, they will occupy less storage and will reduce the server load. Maintaining these WordPress plugins will be much easier for you and enhance your site’s speed significantly.
Choose Lightweight Theme
As we have explained before, in the case of WordPress website plugins, heavy themes may also hinder the smooth delivery of content and enhance speed. When WordPress themes are packed with heavy elements, high-quality imagery, long videos, and too many effects, your website will be slow to load.
When you are choosing such themes, it requires heavy coding and takes up a lot of space. The users will get frustrated and exit your website immediately increasing the bounce rate. So try to use lightweight themes that will not inflate your website code and improve the site’s performance at once. Pick out simple themes with necessary features, plugins, imagery, and other content.
When you have a simple, robust, functional, and performance-friendly WordPress theme for your WordPress website- you can enjoy higher ranks. This deeply benefits your SEO while search engines crawl to your site to give rank.
Delete Needless Plugins
When we talk about WordPress plugins, always remember that quality is better than quantity. If you are working with too many plugins at once, it will wreck your WordPress website’s speed and performance. You should know that each plugin is a small piece of software. Unnecessary plugins in the background will only consume unnecessary space and resources.
If you cut them back or in simple language delete them, your whole site will be faster and optimized. Firstly, deactivate any plugin that you are not using and then test your WordPress website to verify it functions properly. Additionally, after deleting the unrequired plugins, run some tests using the proper tools and check out the difference in speed.
Update Themes, Plugins & Other Software Regularly
When you are handling and managing your WordPress website, you need to keep everything updated. The core themes, plugins, software, and other extensions that you are working on all need to be up to date. It is important because it will effectively influence your site’s performance and help you to patch all the problematic areas on your WordPress site.
You can approach any WordPress website development agency that can smoothly update your site with zero downtime. Remember that optimizing your WordPress website will only enhance your site’s functionality and core performance.
Compressing Or Resize Images
Images with large sizes often tend to slow down the WordPress website. Reducing your image sizes and resizing them will make your site much more enhanced performance-wise. There is no need to compromise the quality of the imagery (pictures) on your WordPress website. You need to optimize the size of images but remember that does not make them so small to save space on your site that your target audience has to squinch their eyes while checking out the visuals. There should be a balance between all these factors and you can use WordPress image optimization plugins with the help of WordPress website development agencies for proper guidance. Moreover, this will benefit your SEO and help your WordPress website secure better rankings.
Clean Old WordPress Database To Optimize The Speed
WordPress websites collect data and information from various sources. The accumulated data usually takes up a lot of storage space and increases the server load. The data are usually old, spam, leftover data from unrequired or unused themes or plugins, comment spam, data of old users, unpublished content, old media files, and so on.
You must immediately optimize your website and clean up all the unrequired, old, and spammy data or information. Delete the old files from your WordPress database and media library. The extra storage boost from deleting all these databases will speed up your website loading time and help you gain more traffic.
Employ Caching To Boost Site Loading Process
Your WordPress website can improve its performance and speed by implementing a caching plugin. This plugin is a very effective strategy that can simplify the whole process of retrieving and downloading contents and data each time a user requests them from a web browser to the server. It helps in reducing network latency and saves up a lot of storage capacity.
Caching serves as a shortcut. Whenever a user requests a file, it saves the whole file for future visits too. Therefore, it eliminates the need of again saving the whole content. Caching helps in skipping over this whole process as it writes a web page after it has been opened one time.
Run Periodical Performance Tests & Speed Diagnosis
Always run regular or at least periodic diagnostics for your WordPress website to know where you stand. The site performance is dependable on multiple factors and has various parameters to measure the core performance. To be specific, the WordPress website performance depends on the geographical location/region of the visitors, the internet connectivity (bandwidth and speed), server pool, caching of the web browsers, and so on.
Testing the page speed is essential to know where your WordPress website is currently standing at. Therefore, from this data, you can understand and analyze the problem areas. You need to immediately fix those issues and enhance your site’s speed to load data. There are multiple tools available for you as well as you can ask for any professional help that will suggest a plan of action for you.
Conclusion
The WordPress website has many avenues and elements that are always running to offer the best results to your target audience. You must manage your WordPress site properly.
By implementing the above-mentioned techniques, you can enhance your website’s speed and performance immensely. Not only that, but by offering a fast-loading website to the users, you can give them a seamless experience and expect a traffic surge on your WordPress site too. And the best part is that it will directly benefit your SEO rankings.