Enlightening oneself with ways to speed up WordPress websites is an important skill for any website owner. Why so?
WordPress page loading speed affects website traffic, conversions, bounce rates, user satisfaction, and profits. Thus for these reasons we have prepared a detailed guide for you. This guide will provide you with all the required insights about how to speed up WordPress sites and measure WordPress speed tests. Further, we have also listed some effective ways to help you speed up WordPress sites. These tricks and techniques range from basic to intermediate to advanced measures so that users of advanced skill levels will get in charge of something they can implement.
So are you all set to say goodbye to poor WordPress performance? So let us move further.
Why is it Significant for You to Speed Up WordPress Sites?
There are various that can justify the importance of speeding up the WordPress backend. Here are some of these reasons follows:
- Famous search engines like Google rank each website in decreasing order of loading speed of the websites. Thus, if you want to boost your position in SERPs, it is quite significant for you to consider taking the WordPress performance test as a priority.
- Various research and studies in the market state that the loading speed of more than 2-3 seconds leads to about 47% of visitors getting off the website. Thus it keeps only about half of their visitors interested. Thus it requires you to speed up the WordPress site.
- Research states that online buyers are one of the most impatient of them all as they expect the webpage to load within a second and respond promptly. So if you are operating an eCommerce store on WordPress, it is very much required for you to make constant improvements so that your business can turn out to be much more profitable.
How Can You Conduct a WordPress Speed Test for Your Website?
First things on the radar, you would need to analyze the present loading time of your website. Also, keep it noted that this loading speed might be different from one web page to another as it depends on various factors like
- Size of your webpage.
- The number of requests it produces daily.
- Your web page is cached or not.
- Last but not least, what kind of content is hosted on your webpage.
The homepage of any website is generally considered a benchmark to conduct the WordPress speed test. Thus to conduct a WordPress performance test, below listed are some of the tools that could be used extensively across the web:
- WebPageTest.org
- Gt Metrix
- Tools.Pingdom.com
- PageSpeed Insights ( It does not go well with the report of the page loading time, but it highlights the elements very well that could help you to speed up WordPress site)
So now is the time you should approach web development service providers and talk about your business.
9 Effective Ways to Speed Up WordPress Site
1. Opt for a Better Web Hosting Provider
One of the major factors that would impact your WordPress performance is the web hosting of your WordPress website. It might appear as an effective idea to host your website on a shared hosting provider that would provide you with “unlimited bandwidth, emails, space, domains, and many more. Moreover, the major points we tend to miss out on regarding sharing hosting environments. As they fail to cater to their users with robust loading times on peak traffic hours, most fail to provide 99% in any given month.
Shared hosting is likely to deliver poor performance as you share your website’s server space with other websites. Further, there is no record of how many resources are used by others. Apart from this, you are not acknowledged by several WordPress optimization plugins. So do you want to get insights about how to optimize WordPress site speed?
Fortunately, the hosting web sector has advanced with technology, and the rates of cloud hosting providers have reduced over a long period. Therefore in current times, one can purchase dedicated cloud servers from SiteGround, Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, and Google Computer Engine, for that matter, for nominal pricing. Settling these servers up can be a daunting task as you must manage servers up from the beginning. Various web hosting providers like Cloudways and many more make managing optimized cloud services as easy as click and launch.
2. Make Use of a Lightweight WordPress Framework/Theme
There are various WordPress themes with versatile elements, widgets, sliders, social icons, and many more glossy elements that are exceedingly appealing to your eye. But keep this in mind that if you have too many aspects and higher page sizes, it will cause issues with your web server.
The most appropriate option here is to go ahead with lightweight themes or frameworks. This is one of the effective solutions that could help you with improved WordPress performance. Furthermore, you can also try something different like Neve for your website, as it is developed by the same guys that have built CodeinWP. Thus to run your feature-rich website smoothly, you need to choose a theme that uses effective frameworks like Foundation or Bootstrap.
3. Reduced Image Sizes
Images are one of the major benefactors to the size increment of the provided webpage. One of the effective techniques to speed up the WordPress backend is to reduce the size of the image without yielding on the quality of the product. For instance, manually optimize the images using Chrome PageSpeed insights extension, PhotoShop, or other WordPress optimization plugins. It might take longer than usual for you to complete the process. Thankfully there are various WordPress optimization plugins available that can help you with everything you can brainstorm about. It also includes image optimization and many more. Here are some of them that are worth mentioning:
- WP Smush
- Optimal
- EWWW Image Optimizer
Using any of the plugins mentioned above for your WordPress website will have a huge impact on the reduced image sizes, thus resulting in improvised WordPress performance tuning.
4. Reduce JS and CSS Files
If you are operating on your website through Google PageSpeed Insights tools, then you may get notified about minimizing the size of your JS and CSS files. This implies that decreasing the number of Js and CSS calls and the sizes for those files can speed up WordPress sites.
In addition to that, if you know your way around WordPress themes, you can closely study the guides granted by Google and do some manual fixing. If not done, then several WordPress optimization plugins will help you to reach your goal. One of the well-known ones is Autoptimize which would help them in optimizing Js and CSS and even HTML for your WordPress website. Read more on top ways to speed up WordPress site performance.
5. Make Use of Advanced Caching Mechanisms with Caching Plugins
WordPress caching plugins like W3 Total Cache has been there in the market for a long time, making the complicated operations of adding caching rules to your website aspects much easier. Blending in with such plugins with advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish can provide you with a better page loading speed for your website. This would result in improved WordPress performance considerably.
6. Make Use of CDN
The visitors that would visit your website belong to several locations globally, and it would be pointless to mention that the site loading speed will vary if the visitors are situated far away from where your website is hosted. There are several CDN (Content Delivery Networks) in the market that would help to speed up WordPress sites to the lowest for the visitors from various countries. A CDN makes a record of your website in several data centers that are located in distinct places. The most basic function of CDN is to serve the web page to a visitor from the immediate possible location. Cloudflare and MaxCDN are among some of the top-rated CDN services. Check out these 12 best free CDN services for WordPress sites.
7. Clearance of WordPress Database
Timely cleansing data from your database will keep its size to a minimum and further help you decrease the size of your routine backups. It is also required for you to delete spam comments, fake users, and old drafts of your content, and sometimes even consider removing unwanted plugins and themes. It will decrease the size of your database and web files and thus speed up WordPress sites.
8. Deactivate or Uninstall Plugins
It is baseless to keep unwanted plugins on your WordPress websites that will add a lot of junk to your web files. Furthermore, it will also expand the size of your backup and place an overwhelming amount of load on your server resources while your backup files are being produced. It is better to eliminate the plugins you do not use and look for alternative methods to use third-party services for scheduling and automating tasks. IFTTT and Zapier are two web service providers that would help automate tasks and lower the burden on your website server.
9. Keep External Scripts to the Lowest
Using external scripts on your website can include a big chunk of data to your entire loading time. Thus, it would be best to use a few scripts, including the only necessary ones like tracking tools like Google Analytics or commenting systems like Disqus.
Conclusion
The major advantage of reducing your website’s loading time is that it will immensely help boost the user experience of your visitors. The case rests the same whether they are using it from PCs or mobile devices. Moreover, it will also boost your ranking in the SERPs as reduced bandwidth usage of your hosting, and quicker site-loading speed on the client side will be advantageous to you in both the short and long term.
You shall now start analyzing your WordPress performance test and looking for ways to speed up the WordPress site. If further for better assistance, reach out to top WordPress development services.
