In this article, We will learn the 10 Best Ways to Speed up your WordPress Website that actually works.
If you don’t take the necessary precautions, your site may become sluggish. This is cumbersome for frequent visitors, as well as a loss of subscriptions and customers.
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The Importance of WordPress Site Speed
You just have a few seconds to capture someone’s interest and encourage them to stay on your website when they arrive for the first time.
A 2-second delay in page responsiveness lowered user happiness by 3.8 percent, increased lost revenue per user by 4.3 percent, and reduced clicks by 4.3 percent, according to a report by the Microsoft Bing search team.
Most people will quit your site if it takes too long to load, and you will miss out on the opportunity to engage them.
Not only that, but Google’s ranking algorithm now takes site speed into account. That implies that your site’s performance has an impact on SEO, so if your site is slow, you’ll lose visitors due to impatience and see a drop in search engine results.
Let’s fix it!
How To Speed Up WordPress
As a side note, they aren’t in any particular sequence; I’ve simply compiled everything I’ve learned about how to make the WordPress page load faster and posted it all here.
I promise that even a couple of these will make your site load faster.
1. Invest in Good Website Hosting
At first glance, a shared host may appear to be an excellent deal (“Unlimited page views!”). It comes at a price, however: extremely sluggish site performance and frequent outages during peak demand periods.
Running your WordPress site on shared hosting is a recipe for disaster if you plan on publishing popular content.
The stress of your site falling down after a major feature is enough to cause a few grey hairs to sprout: don’t be a victim, invest in good hosting.
We Recommend these Best Hostings to Buy:
Best 4 Hostings You Should invest in 2022
2. Choose a Lightweight Theme:
In the WordPress market, there are beautiful and attractive themes. But keep in mind that themes with a lot of dynamic content, widgets, sliders, sidebars, and other features might slow down your hosting server.
Always choose a lightweight WordPress theme or optimize your WordPress theme. If you wish to run a blogging website, the default WordPress themes may be sufficient. You may utilize themes built on Bootstrap and Foundation for extra functionality.
Related Post:
05 Best WordPress themes for blogs in 2021
3. Use Best Website Caching Plugin
LiteSpeed Cache is by far my favorite plugin for Caching; I wouldn’t suggest or use any other caching plugin because it contains all of the capabilities you’ll need and is really simple to set up and use.
Simply install and activate, and your page will load quicker due to the caching of components.
4. Enhance your photos
Smush, a Yahoo! image optimizer, is available. It will significantly reduce the file size of a photograph without sacrificing quality.
However, if you’re anything like me, doing this to every photograph would be excruciatingly painful and time-consuming.
Fortunately, there is a fantastic, free plugin called Smush that will automatically do this procedure on all of your photos as you upload them.
5. Use LazyLoad to your images
LazyLoad is the method of having just the images above the fold load (i.e. only the images visible in the visitor’s browser window), then the remaining images begin to load just before they come into view when the reader scrolls down.
This will not only make your sites load faster, but it will also conserve bandwidth by loading less data for users who do not scroll all the way down.
Install the Smush plugin to make this happen automatically.
6. Regulate Gravatar images
You’ll note that the default Gravatar image on this site is… nothing.
This isn’t an aesthetic decision; I did it because having nothing where a silly-looking Gravatar logo or other junk would ordinarily be helped page load times.
You may do either, however altering the default image (located in “Discussion” under the settings tab in the WordPress admin) to a blank space rather than a default picture can help your site load faster.
7. Remove Unused Widgets & Social Sharing Buttons
When it comes to widgets, WordPress users have a tendency to go overboard. Users feel that adding as many widgets as possible will improve the usability of their website, however many are unaware that these widgets have a cost in addition to their price.
Because of the enormous number of requests performed on the front end, widgets tend to bulk up your website, resulting in poor load times. A new database query is also required for each request.
In this instance, the simplest way to speed up your WordPress website is to limit your widgets to a bare minimum and just utilize the ones that your website truly requires. You may also employ codes for other functions, which are a lot less resource-intensive means of making your site functioning.
8. Make your homepage as quick to load as possible:
This isn’t just one thing; there are a few simple things you can do to guarantee that your homepage loads quickly, which is arguably the most crucial portion of your site because it’s where most visitors will land.
Among the things you can accomplish are:
- Instead of entire postings, show excerpts.
- Reducing the quantity of postings on the page is a good idea (7-10 Should be the best)
- Remove any sharing widgets that aren’t needed from the front page (include them only in posts)
- Any plugins or widgets that aren’t in use should be removed.
- Keep it simple! Readers aren’t looking for 8,000 widgets on the site; they’re looking for content.
Overall, a focused and clean homepage design will help your page not only appear beautiful but also load faster.
9. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
All of your favorite major sites utilize it, and if you’re into online marketing using WordPress (as I’m sure many of my readers are), you won’t be shocked to learn that CDNs are used by some of your favorite blogs, such as Copyblogger.
A CDN, or content delivery network, takes all of your static assets (CSS, Javascript, and graphics, for example) and serves them on servers as close to your visitors as feasible, allowing users to download them as quickly as possible.
There is a plugin called Cloudflare that claims to perform the same. It’s the best plugin for CDN.
10. By Using CloudFlare
This is identical to the part on CDNs above, but after discussing CloudFlare in my top web analytics piece, I’ve chosen to include it separately here.
To put it clearly, CloudFlare, in conjunction with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin mentioned earlier, is a very powerful combo (they integrate) that will dramatically enhance not just the performance, but also the security of your site.
