A WordPress site’s performance is directly linked to search engine ranking, user satisfaction, and revenue. Without proper optimisation techniques, you cannot expect to see growth but will experience a gradual slowdown of your website. Nevertheless, there are ways you can speed up your WordPress site’s performance, and they are not so difficult to follow.
We have compiled ideas on improving your website speed, making it fast-loading, and influencing overall site performance. Here are 10 Ways to Speed Up and improve your WordPress Site’s Performance.
Why taking care of WordPress Site Speed is Important?
If you are aware of the bounce rate factor of the website, you must know how it is essential for a website to have optimal speed. With a high Bounce rate, you can tell that your website is not meeting visitors’ expectations. According to both Google and Bing, users’ visits to a site drastically reduce only with a 0.4 second delay. With a poor loading speed, expect your visitors to go back, observe an increase in bounce rate, and impacting your rankings.
Test Your WordPress Site Speed
Before you begin to make changes to your website performance, you must get a baseline of your website’s current speed, status, and performance. You may be thinking you have a fast-loading website, but that is because you are spending too much time working on your site, which leads to cached files. It will result in a faster loading experience for you than a fresh visitor.
We are introducing two tools that will tell you about your WordPress site’s performance, GTMetrix, and Pingdom. Run your site through these tools to obtain the baseline figure. You can again re-run the website after applying the suggested tactics below to compare.
1. Choose an Appropriate Quality Hosting
Investing in a quality hosting provider is crucial to see your WordPress site’s most manageable growth and improvement. When choosing a host based on performance, it is an excellent idea to go for a managed host with a server architecture of shared hosting and additional services. However, this type of hosting seems to slow down during peak traffic hours.
In contrast, dedicated cloud servers offer quicker response time. The biggest drawback to this system is that the installation and operation can be tricky, for which you need to hire experts.
2. Keep Core, Themes, Plugins Updated
The cores, plugins and themes require regular updates. However, it may introduce new features, bugs, and security vulnerabilities. Make sure to manage and fix them immediately. You cannot skip updating as it will negatively affect website’s performance. Plus, the frequent update ensures better security and less risk of getting attacked by malware and hackers.
3.Select a Quality WordPress Theme
Not every theme is equally great. Some help performs better, while some are nothing but a bloating mess. Thus, it is crucial what theme you choose, and from where because it will considerably impact your website performance.
Also, choose a theme with features you need, lightweight, not too fancy, and which uses a quality framework such as Foundation or Bootstrap. Remember, you can add features later using plugins.
4. Remove Unnecessary Plugins
It is no wonder that plugins are essential. However, getting overboard with them can be damaging. You need to understand which plugins are relevant for your website. In addition, delete the ones that are no more important. The more plugins you have, the more it will slow down your website speed. Plus, the risk of plugin conflict also increases. There are again more lightweight alternatives to heavy plugins.
5. Optimize Your WordPress Database
Working on the WordPress database can make sites slow over time. Expect remnants of the old posts, plugins, and other elements. It can take up disk space, and your database queries may take longer to execute.
To keep things fresh and database lean, use tools that help simplify the process. Some popular plugins such as WP-optimise WP-DBManager and Advanced database cleaner will help optimise and clean your database.
6. Optimize Your Images
Optimising the site’s image is a brilliant idea to save a lot of space, improving the site speed. Try to reduce the size of the image without compromising the quality. For this, use tools such as TinyPNG. They help size down an image dramatically before uploading. Moreover, a plugin such as WP Smush is also excellent, automatically compressing images when you upload them to your site.
7. Use a CDN
How fast your site loads depend on the location of the site’s server. So, if you are working in England and your server is somewhere in the USA, then expect a slow speed. However, there is always a way, and for this, you can use CDN or a content delivery network.
A CDN allows the website’s file hosting on multiple servers at once. So, if a user enters your site from a particular region, they will get connected from the nearest server to their physical location. The two most popular CDNS are Cloudflare and MaxCDN.
8. Use a Caching Plugin
Using a caching plugin could help you drastically improve speed in WordPress. Using Caching plugins experience reduction of database calls. Plus, upon entering your website the users get a static HTML version of the page.
In some hosting opportunities, you will get it built in. But those who don’t get from their hosting can use caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.
9. Use File Minification
Similar to images, it is also a good idea to minify the files. It will ensure an easy read of the file by the browser. Plus, larger files take longer to read, which could eventually show up in your site performance as slow speed. The process allows the reduction of the total number of working files and cleans up the site’s code within, which is more efficient.
Instead of doing it yourself to the Javascript and CSS files which requires time and techniques, you can use simple plugins such as Autoptimize or caching plugins W3 Total Cache for minifying.
10. Have Regular Site Monitoring
To get an idea of your site’s performance or better understand why your site may be slowing down, it is wise to monitor your site’s performance regularly.
With managed WordPress host, you will get this automatically as they actively monitor your site for slow down and try to fix them immediately.
However, you need to take things into your hand with a different hosting and use plugins such as WordFence. It regularly monitors and scans website performance and capacity. You can also use a web tool named Pingdom, which sends you email updates on the slow performance of the site.
To summarise,
The processes we mentioned on Ways to Speed Up your WordPress Site’s Performance are, without doubt, fundamental basics. You need to apply them regularly. Doing it yourself could be a little frustrating at times as they require some coding, website design knowledge, and more.
If you encounter problems or lack expertise, you can always come to WPPro for assistance. We are proficient in managing your WordPress site issues and fixing them immediately. To get more details on our services contact us here.
