Speeding up your WordPress website is one of a hot topic nowadays these days. Thus people came up with certain solutions for that. We have numerous of ways today to speed up the WordPress Site. But the question arises here that why do we need to do that, which there are many reasons few among them are:
Search engines (like Google) rank fast websites for loading time. Therefore, if you want to improve your position in SERPs, then improving the speed should be one of your priorities.
Studies have shown that the site-loading speed of more than 2 seconds usually bounces about 47 percent of visitors from the website. So, you should speed up your WordPress.
Online buyers are very impatient. They expect that the page will load within a second. Therefore, if you are running an e-commerce store on WordPress, you are better prepared to make big improvements so that your business can be more profitable.
How one can test the loading time of their Website.
First of all, you need to analyze the current load time for your website. Keep in mind that this speed page can vary from page to page because it depends on various factors, that is:
- The size of that particular page,
- How many requests does this generate,
- Whether it has been cached or not,
- And finally, what kind of content (static or dynamic) it hosts.
A website’s homepage is usually used as a benchmark to test load time. To check the speed of the website, the following three devices are used extensively on the whole web:
- WebPageTest.org
- Tools.Pingdom.com
- Page Speed Insights (This does not actually report the page loading time, but exposes the elements that you can tweak to speed WordPress)
Few ways are mentioned below to speed up the WordPress website.
1. Choose a better web hosting provider
The main factor influencing the speed of a website is to host your WordPress website using WordPress help. It may look like a good idea to host your new website on a shared hosting provider that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, space, email, domain and more. However, what we usually miss about this proposal is that the shared hosting environment fails to deliver good loading times during peak traffic, and fails to provide 99 percent uptime in any given month.
2. Use a lightweight WordPress theme
With a lot of dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, social icons, and many more shiny elements, WordPress themes are very appealing to the eye. But remember this: If they have too many elements and high page sizes, they will definitely cause your web server to take a thumping.
The best option here is to use light themes such as WordPress’s default theme. The new Twenty Fifteen topic is always a great way to start a blog. For a feature-rich website, you can also opt for a topic that uses a good framework like Bootstrap or Foundation.
3. Reduce Image sizes
Images are a key contributor to a given webpage. The trick is to reduce the size of the images without compromising on quality.
If you manually optimize images using the Chrome PagesSpace Insights extension or Photoshop or any other tool, the process will take a long time. Fortunately, there are plugins available for everything you can think about, including image optimization.
4. Minify JS and CSS files
If you run your website through the Google PageSpace Insights tool, you will likely be notified of reducing the size of your CSS and JS files. This means that by reducing the number of CSS and JS calls and the size of those files, you can improve site-loading speed.
5. Clean up WordPress Database
Removing unwanted data from your database will minimize its size and also help reduce the size of your backup. It is necessary to remove spam comments, fake users, old drafts of your content, and perhaps unwanted plugins, as well as the theme. This will reduce the size of your database and web files, and thus WordPress will speed up your WordPress.
6. Deactivate or Uninstall plugins
Placing unwanted plug-ins on your WordPress websites will make you much more screwed in web files. In addition, this will also increase the size of your backups and your server will put a lot of load on the resources while the backup file is being generated. It would be better to get rid of the plugins you do not use and to find alternative ways to use third-party services for automatic or scheduling tasks (like sharing your latest post on social media).
7. Enable GZIP Compression
We can use GZIP compression for the web since compressing files saves a lot of disk space on the local computer. This maneuvering will dramatically reduce the bandwidth usage and it will take time to reach your website. GZIP compresses various files so that whenever a visitor tries to access your website; Their browser must first unzip the website. This process greatly reduces the use of bandwidth usage.
Conclusion
The biggest benefit of reducing the loading time of your website is that it will help you improve your visitors’ experience. No matter whether they use it in mobile devices or PC, the case remains the same. In addition, it will also improve your ranking in SERPs. Eventually, the low bandwidth usage of your hosting and fast site-loading speed on the client side will only give you long-term benefits as well as short-term.