Are you frustrated because your WordPress website performance is low and looking at how to turning up WordPress website performance? Yes, you are searching that’s why this article is on your front.
People try to optimize WordPress website speed in many ways, but it actually those work! Don’t worry, in this article, I will explain in depth how to turning up your WordPress website performance to load fast your website.
So, without further ado, let’s jump to the main topic.
Why need to speed up WordPress performance?
If you know a little bit about websites or WordPress, I am sure you know the importance of speed optimization. A fast-loading website helps to improve user experience, increase page views, and most important is it helps with SEO ranking.
Besides, visitors leave your website if it takes so much time to load. They easily visit another website. A slow website loses your conversion rate and decreases page views. On top of that, fast loading has a great impact to rank the site at the top.
So, I hope you understand the importance of speed optimization of WordPress websites to get more visitors.
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Also read: Top 5 WordPress Plugin for SEO
How to check the current WordPress website speed?
When you visit a website for the first time, it takes a little moment than the second time. Did you notice that?
Yes, It’s normal. When we visit a website for the first time, all the files load on our device from the server. Besides, the browser also stores some files as a cache. As a result, when we visit the site one more time, some file loads from the device and the website loads fast.
So now the question is how to check the actual speed of a website!
There are lots of websites are available to check the speed of your website. those tools check websites from different locations worldwide. Some popular speed test websites are Pingdom, IsItWP, PageSpeed Insights, etc.
Those tools also provide a detailed report of your website and suggest you for improving speed. The best loading time of a website is 2s.
Reasons to slow WordPress Website.
There are some reasons to slow a WordPress website and the main reasons are website page size and server speed. Besides, some more causes are also there that will discuss of them below.
The main reason that increases your page size is the image. If you use images without optimization, your website page size will be huge. As a result, the website will take some time to load.
Another cause is server speed. If you use a low-quality server to host your website, it slows the website’s loading speed. That’s why we always recommend using high-quality shared hosting or Managed WordPress hosting for better performance.
Using a poor plugin and theme that is not well coded also slows a website. That’s why we always need to use optimized and well-coded themes and plugins. The unused theme, plugins, and files will also be a reason to slow a website.
Steps to speed up WordPress website.
Now we know why and what things slow our website. We need to turning up WordPress performance for better conversion and ranking. So without wasting time let’s start step by step to increase WordPress website performance.
Choose a better hosting
The first thing we need to ensure is a good hosting server. Low-quality hosting server is not configured well and the data transfer speed is also low. As a result, when many visitors visit the website at a time it impacts the server and gets your website down.
On the other hand, if you use high-quality shared hosting, your website runs smoothly. Those servers are well-configured. Some companies provide default optimization plugins that boost your website performance.
You can also use Managed WordPress Hosting for better performance. It is fully optimized for WordPress. With WordPress Hosting you will get some extra benefits including automatic backup, automatic updates, and advanced security that helps to protect your website.
To get the best website performance we always recommend buying hosting from Bluehost, Siteground, and a2Hosting.
Better Image Optimization
Image is an important element to fulfill your website or content. It makes our website eye-catchy and increases user attention. But sometimes it may a reason to be slow the website.
If you upload the original image, your website must be slow to load. Every raw or original image from your phone or camera has a big size. So image optimization is very important to make sure the speed of the website.
Before uploading images to your website, you must optimize image to reduce it’s size. There is some way to optimize your photos those are:
Photo editing tools: You can use popular photo-editing tools like Adobe Photoshop, ON1 Photo, GIMP, etc. Those tools have built-in photo compression features.
Online photo compression: If you want to compress your photos online, yes you can do it. The most popular online photo compressing tool is TinyPNG and JPEGmini. Those web tools make your image size small without reducing image quality.
WordPress Plugin: There is also some plugin to optimize images. ShortPixel, Optimole, and EWWW Image Optimizer are best for image optimization. I prefer to use ShortPixel.
Caching plugin setup
Caching plugin is very important to load your website faster to your user. When we visit a website, the browser sends an HTTP request to the server, asking it to send a copy of the website. Then the request collect code from PHP and collect data from the database and then it sends a copy to the browser by converting HTML content. It’s a lengthy process.
If we use a caching plugin, A cached copy of the website is always ready to load instantly. As a result, users can visit the site within a short time.
There are many WordPress caching plugins available (free and paid). W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, etc are popular. You can use one of them. Besides, some hosting providers like SiteGround and Bluehost by default provide a caching solution.
Use optimized theme and plugins
To create a WordPress website, you must use themes and plugins. What happens, if themes and plugins make the website slower?
Using a poorly coded theme can slow your website’s loading speed. Before using themes and plugins, we always need to ensure those are optimized for speed and well-coded. To get the best theme check this article.
Use Content delivery network
The content delivery network(CDN) is another important part of the fast loading of your website anywhere worldwide. When visitors visit your site, the loading speed also depends on the distance between the server location and the user .
CDN stores some static files in every server worldwide and served data from the nearest server to the user. As a result, the user gets a fast loading speed of your website. CDN also protects our website by enhancing security.
Some popular CDN networks are Cloudflare, Sucuri, Bunny, etc.
We need to keep in mind some more things those are:
- Remove unnecessary plugins: Unnecessary themes and plugins also slow down our website. To turning up WordPress website performance, we need to remove unused themes and plugins from our website.
- Minify CSS and JS Files: Minification reduces the file size. All the CSS and JS files of a website are not minified. If we minify our website’s CSS and JS files, it helps to load the website fast.
- Up-to-date theme, and plugin: Every web development company always working hard to fix issues, add security, and also optimize for the speed of their product. So we always need to update the theme and plugin regularly to get the best performance.
- Use the latest version of PHP: WordPress runs on PHP language. We always need to use the latest PHP version to avoid the low performance of our website.
- Try lazy loading for images: Lazy Loading also reduces site loading speed. Lazy loading allows the loading of website structure and text first. Once loading website, then it loads images, fonts, and other js files. The result is the website loads fast for the user.
- Use video and audio from other sources: Video and audio are another important part of a website. If you want to get more engagement, you must need video in your content. But the problem is, if you use video and audio from your web server, your website must be slow. So we always use video and audio from other sources like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. It helps to speed up website performance and saves server space.
- Limit background process: The background process is able to speed down your website. Sometimes we enable scheduled post, automatic backup, automatic cache, database cleaning, etc that runs in the background and slows your website. So we need to reduce the background process or need to set a schedule when the website has low visitors.
- Paginate comments: Comments also cause to slow your website to. Suppose you are getting more comments from your posts, It’s great. But if all the comments load with a post or articles, the website may slow to load. So we need to paginate comments so that our website loads fast.
Conclusion
I hope you read the full article and that it helps to turning up Your WordPress performance. I tried to cover all the things to speed up your WordPress website.
If the website is fast, it will help to get the top ranking and more visitors. So apply the technique that I explained above and check the website speed again. I hope you will see the results.
Don’t forget to leave a comment with your personal opinion.
