One of the trendiest topics currently is how to speed up WordPress websites. There are valid reasons behind it as well. Today most websites run on WordPress platforms, and most people like shopping online. No user would like to encounter a website that loads slowly. To ensure that customers always get the best service, developers carrying out custom WordPress development or website owners find new ways of speeding up WordPress websites. Starting from reaching higher in SERPs to keeping visitors interested all the time, speeding up WP has many benefits.
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Everything You Need to Know About WordPress Speed?
If you are worried about your business website's WordPress performance, you can learn how to speed up the WordPress website. But first, it is important to evaluate the present load time of the website. This speed can differ from one page to another. It depends on numerous factors like:
- The number of requests the website generates every day.
- The size of each page.
- The type of content the website is hosting means whether it is dynamic or static.
- Whether the pages are cached or not.
The best way of testing the load time is through the homepage of the website, as normally, it is employed as a benchmark. The Internet houses several high-end tools that are nowadays used for checking the website speed.
How to Make WordPress Site Load Faster?
We all know the popularity of WordPress as the best CMS platform but yet tweaking it at some point or the other is necessary for speeding it up. A custom WordPress development company uses the following techniques to speed up WordPress:
1. Select a Dependable Web Hosting Provider
The biggest factor that impacts the website speed is the hosting of the WordPress website. Usually, people host a new site on a shared hosting provider offering unrestricted space, domains, bandwidth, emails, etc. But this offer has a loophole too. Shared hosting is unsuccessful in delivering proper loading times, especially on high traffic hours. Most fail to offer ninety-nine percent uptime in a month.
Sharing the similar server space with numerous websites leads to poor performance by shared hosting. Also, this happens when proper optimization of the servers doesn’t take place.
The web-hosting sector of the present times is powered by avant-garde technologies, along with the charges of cloud hosting service providers decreasing with time. Now you have the option of purchasing dedicated cloud servers at cost-effective prices. But setting the servers is a challenging task as you need to set those up from the beginning. But the services of web hosting providers are always available these days, making the process of setting augmented cloud servers a breeze.
2. Decreasing the Size of the Images
Suppose there is a given webpage carrying a lot of images. But it might slow down the website. The trick over here is to decrease the image sizes by maintaining the quality. Optimizing the images manually with Photoshop or other tools is a lengthy process. But now, you can get hands-on plugins that can excellently work image optimization as well. Some of the plugins you must use to speed up WordPress are WP Smush, EWWW image optimizer and Optimal.
3. Caching Plugins
People have been using WP caching plugins like W3 Total Cache for a long time. This helps simplify the errands of adding the caching rules to the website elements that are otherwise quite complicated. When the advanced mechanisms of caching and plugins are combined, this will increase the website's speed. Speeding up WordPress will be the ultimate result.
4. Utilizing a Lightweight WP Framework/Theme
WordPress themes with numerous sliders, dynamic elements, social icons are extremely eye-catching to the human eye. But if the themes contain elevated page sizes and many elements, these will lead to a thumped web server. Using lightweight themes is the trick over here. There are many default WP themes that you must use. If you want your website to be feature-rich, you can go for a theme utilizing a proper framework such as Foundation or Bootstrap.
5. CSS Files and Minify JS
This is another effective way to improve WordPress speed. When you run the website via Google PageSpeed Insights tool, it will be alerting you regarding decreasing the size of the JS and CSS files. It is mainly for the reason of enhancing the website-loading speed. You can get hands-on manual fixing for achieving this. In case facing issues, then you can use plugins to achieve this objective.
6. Utilizing a CDN
Users from every part of the world can visit your website. It is quite obvious that the website's loading speed will differ in case the visitors are situated far away from where the website is hosted. You can gain help from Content Delivery Networks that helps keep the site's loading speed to a minimum for those who belong from other countries. CDN stores a copy of the website in numerous data centers situated in different places. The preliminary role of a CDN is to attend the webpage to visitors from locations in proximity. The most noteworthy CDN services of the present times are MaxCDN and Cloudflare.
7. Keeping Minimal External Scripts
When external scripts are utilized on the web pages, these end up adding a massive amount of data to the entire loading time. Hence, it is advisable to utilize fewer scripts and incorporate only the most important ones like tracking tools or commenting systems. By keeping the focus on these subtle yet highly critical tips, you can largely improve the loading speed of your website.
Final Say
The simple techniques of how to speed up WordPress websiteis now clear to us. When the website's loading time is lower, it will help boost the visitors' experience. It is the same whether they are utilizing a PC or a mobile device. Speedier website loading and decreased bandwidth utilization of the hosting will benefit you in the short and long run. If facing problems in speeding up WordPress, then a custom WordPress developmentcompany can always be useful.