Are you looking forward to speeding up the WordPress site?
Total loading pages enhance user experience, boost your page views, and also help you lead and sales. This article has listed some useful and trusted WordPress performance tuning tips that could help you speed up the WordPress site and boost its performance. Contrary to other lists of best WordPress optimization plugins or various tips to speed up WordPress backend tutorials. It is a complete guide for a better understanding of what WordPress performance tuning is.
Here we have covered topics like why it is required to speed up the WordPress site, what basically slows down your website, and accordingly have listed some of the best ways to help you immediately improve WordPress performance. Here we have provided you with a table of content that will provide you with all the topics covered in this article.
Why is Speeding up the WordPress Website so Crucial?
While analyzing various studies and research, it is understood that from 2000 to 2016, the average human attention span for a website has dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds. Thus you might be wondering how it matters to the website owner?
It matters as now you are left with very little time to inspire your users with content and motivate them to stay on your website. Thus, a slow website can lose its potential clients before even they look at the website.
As per the study, which included Google, Amazon, and other large-scale websites, states that a single second of delay in page load time can cause you to bear a 7% loss in conversions. Furthermore, 11% fewer page views and a decrease of 16% in customer satisfaction are also witnessed.
In addition to this, Google and other well-known search engines have already begun penalizing slower websites by motivating them in the search results. It means that there will be lower traffic for slow websites. In brief, words if you are looking for more traffic, revenue, and subscribers from your website. Once done, you need to have a look at what would make your WordPress website.
How Can You Have the WordPress Performance Test for Knowing the Loading Time of Your Website?
Before anything comes, you need to learn how to analyze the current load time for your WordPress site. It would be best to make it a point that website loading speed differs from page to page. The calculation of WordPress performance depends on various factors, Like:
- How many requests are generated?
- Size of a specific page.
- The website is cached or not.
- The type of content it hosts is static or dynamic.
- The first page or homepage of the website is the one that is usually used to check the load time. As if you still have to check on the website’s speed, these are some of the tools that can be highly used around the globe.
The insights for the page speed mainly report the page loading time and some highlights regarding the elements that can help you speed up the WordPress site.
What Are the Factors that Slow Down Your WordPress Site?
The WordPress performance test report will likely provide you with various recommendations for improvement. However, most of it is from technical jargon that would be difficult for beginners to understand. Getting to know about the factors that slow down your WordPress website is one of the vital elements to speed up a WordPress site, improve its performance and make wiser long-term decisions.
These are some of the major causes for a slow website and many more:
- Web Hosting: When the hosting server is not perfectly configured, it can impact the website speed.
- Website Configurations: If there are no chances that the WordPress site is not helping cached pages, it may overload your server, causing your website to be both cash and slow entirely.
- Page Size: most of the time, images are not optimized for the web.
- Bad Plugins: If your website has integrated some poor WordPress optimization plugin, it might slow down your website.
- External Scripts: The external scripts on the websites like front loaders, ads, fonts, lines, and many more play a significant impact on your WordPress performance.
Now, as you very well know what could cause your website to slow down, let us go through common tips that can help you to speed up WordPress sites.
Read more on benefits of using WordPress for your business website:
Common Tips and Tricks That Can Help you Speed up WordPress site
We are looking at various factors that influence page loading speed. We have already made some conclusions about what makes a WordPress website slow or fast. On the other hand, when we talk about the primary and easy steps, you might be right that you can use them to speed up WordPress sites.
1. Commit Towards Quality Hosting
One of the primary and trusted steps to boost your WordPress performance is choosing a good web development service provider for your WordPress site. Numerous cheap offers grab your attention. Do not forget that hosting is one of those areas where you get the quality you can afford. We have already witnessed how much a website’s speed matters. It is not a great place to save. Are you wondering what this means?
The first and foremost thing is that please avoid shared hosting if possible for you as it leads to eliminating the risk of having bad neighbors on your server that can cause a slow down of your website. Until you have a tremendous website and sufficient budget and human resources to run on your server, you should run on a dedicated server. Thus for that reason, VPS is probably one of the best options to opt for. This type of hosting offers a correct balance of comfort, speed, and cost.
Another option is to go ahead with expanding offers of WordPress hosting alternatives. Opting for this option means that you will run on a particularly optimized server for WordPress, and you do not have to stress about all the technical stuff of operating a website. In addition to that, managed WordPress hosting is falling, and the cost of building a managed platform yourself is exceedingly high.
2. Keep Advancing your Web Technology
The second most important thing in our list of ways to speed up WordPress sites is periodically advancing the core technology as the latest versions of PHP, HTML, and other web technologies in the market come out for a reason. These advanced technologies come with improvements, new features, and improvised speed. Thus, for this reason, it is required for you to stay up with the current releases. Your websites should be operating over PHP 7.2 as the older version still gets security updates. Check from the WordPress development services, which is the currently supported PHP version for your website.
A quality web development service provider will monitor these updates and notify you as soon as your PHP version gets outdated. However, this does not imply that you are set free from the responsibilities of checking the updates yourself. When you enter your WordPress hosting backend, ensure that you search for a PHP configuration or a similar menu item. As from here, you can manage which PHP version you are using.
Some old codes, the older version of WordPress, are not compatible with the latest version of PHP. Thus, for this reason, while you are updating your technologies, make sure to test on staging sites and further take a backup. By this process, you do not unintentionally break your live website, as you have better ways to make your changes if something goes off the hook.
3. Make Use of the Latest Versions of WordPress and its Components
All that’s valid for the software on your web server also stays suitable for WordPress. Every latest version of the CMS comes intact with bug fixes, new features, and many more. These latest versions help your website run effectively and efficiently. It also impacts your website from slowing down.
Constantly updating and advancing your website speeds up WordPress sites and helps to resolve security issues. Once you get the latest WordPress version and WordPress optimization plugins and themes, ensure that all your weaknesses get fixed. A compromised website can slow down your website at some point or the other. Keeping a spreadsheet for WordPress optimization plugins can be a good idea to look at what they do. A free google spreadsheet can be a great point, to begin with, for organizing and keeping an overview of all your WooCommerce and WordPress optimization plugins.
Read more on most common WordPress development errors and how to fix them.
4. Reduce on Server Requests
A server request pops up each time your browser requests some resource from your server. It could be a file like a script, image, or style sheet. The more time it takes to complete your server request, the longer it will take to load your side. Thus as a solution, there should be fewer requests as possible. Here we have listed few things that can be done to reduce the server requests to a minimum:
- Reduce the number of posts displayed on the page.
- Only showcase the extracts from the post rather than posting entire posts on your archive pages.
- It would become much easier if you split long posts into pages.
- If you are receiving a lot of comments, then you can break them all into numerous pages.
- Decrease the number of images and other elements from your webpage.
- Uninstall all the non-required plugins, especially the ones that slow down your page.
- Deactivate the WordPress plugins that are not being used by you regularly.
- Allow permission for lazy loading to delay the loading images until they visible on the web page. Best WordPress Lazy Loading Plugins.
- Decrease the number of external resources like fonts if you do not require them.
5. Prevent Hosting Videos on Your Website
As we talk about the media on websites, videos are also a barrier in speeding up WordPress sites. WordPress can host and display videos, but opting for it cannot be a good idea for your website. As in the first place, putting videos on your website will cost you a lot. It is a significant problem if you have a limited budget for hosting an account. In the second place, this could make your WordPress website significantly more comprehensive, and therefore it could become somewhat difficult to get the backup.
On the other hand, various superfast video hosting websites can do a better job than your server. In addition to that, with auto embeds, all you require to do is include videos in your content and copy the video link from YouTube, DailyMotion, or Vimeo and paste the same into the WordPress editor.
Conclusion
Reducing the website loading time of your website will speed up the WordPress site, as this will help you enhance your visitors’ experience. The situation continues to remain the same even if you are using PCs or mobile devices.
In addition to this, speeding up your website will also boost your SERPs rankings. As decreased bandwidth usage of your hosting and speed up WordPress site loading time on users site will advantage you in both short and long periods.
I still need to get deep insights into these ways to speed up a WordPress site. Reach out to top WordPress Development Services to guide you with the most appropriate ways.
