Ways to Make Your WordPress Run Faster
The question of how to speed up WordPress is a trendy issue these days. Fortunately, there are various ways you can use to help you do the task. So, our goal here is to compile a list of every way we’ve discovered for making your WordPress site run faster.
There are a variety of reasons you should speed up your WordPress site:
- Fast-loading websites are ranked higher by search engines, like Google, than slow-loading websites. So, if you want to boost your ranking in SERPs, one of your top priorities should be to increase your speed.
- According to studies, a site that takes more than 2 seconds to load leads roughly half of all visitors to abandon it. As a result, you’ll need to speed up WordPress to keep approximately half of your visitors engaged.
- The most impatient customers shop online, expecting a website to load in under a second. Assume you’re running a WordPress-based e-commerce store. If that’s the case, you’d better get ready to make some significant changes to increase your company’s profitability.
How can you determine how long it takes for your website to load?
First and foremost, you must evaluate the current load time of your website. Keep in mind that the speed of a page might vary depending on several factors, including:
- the size of that specific page,
- the number of requests it generates,
- if it is cached or not,
- last but not least, what type of content it hosts (static or dynamic)
A website’s homepage is frequently used as a baseline for determining load time.
1. Choose a good hosting provider.
The hosting of your WordPress website is an essential factor in determining its speed. Having your site hosted on a shared hosting service with “unlimited” bandwidth, space, emails, domains, and other amenities may appear to be an excellent decision. However, we frequently forget that shared hosting configurations do not deliver fast loading during peak traffic hours. In addition, the majority do not guarantee 99 percent uptime in any given month.
Shared hosting is slower because you’re sharing server space with dozens of other websites. There’s no way of knowing how many resources they’re consuming. Furthermore, you have no idea how well-optimized the servers are.
Thankfully, cloud hosting service rates have decreased over time as technology has evolved. As a result, SiteGround, DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, and even Google Compute Engine now provide dedicated cloud servers at a reasonable cost. Aside from having a good hosting provider, consider having a website performance optimization plugin to help speed up your website. See our review of Nitropack.
2. Use a content delivery network (CDN).
Website visitors come from all over the world, and loading speeds may vary depending on how far they are from the server where your site is hosted. Many CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) can help load websites quickly. It stores a copy of your website in multiple server centers worldwide. A CDN’s main job is to serve a webpage to a visitor from the closest available server.
3. Make use of a light theme or framework.
Many dynamic features, including sliders, widgets, social icons, and other flashy elements, are particularly appealing to the eye in WordPress themes. However, keep in mind that your web server will undoubtedly be affected if there are too many elements or too big of the page.
In this instance, using lightweight themes is the best option. Using one of the WordPress basic themes is one possibility.
4. Reduce the image sizes.
Images contribute significantly to a webpage’s size. The trick is to compress the photographs without sacrificing their quality.
The process will take a long time if you use the Chrome PageSpeed Insights extension, Photoshop, or other tools to optimize the photos manually. Fortunately, there are plugins for almost anything you can imagine, including picture optimization.
5. Reduce the size of your JS and CSS files.
Suppose you use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to examine your website. In that case, you’ll almost certainly be informed that your CSS and JS files need to be smaller. This implies you can enhance site loading speed by reducing the number of CSS and JS calls and the size of those files.
You can also read the Google guides and conduct some manual fixing if you know your way around WordPress themes. Some plugins can also assist you in reaching this goal.
6. Use advanced caching tools with a caching plugin.
Caching plugins for WordPress have been around for a long time. The difficult work of applying caching rules to your website parts is much more manageable. Combining such plugins with advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish can significantly improve the loading speed of your website and, as a result, WordPress.
7. You should enable GZIP compression.
Data compression can help you conserve space on your local computer’s hard drive. GZIP compression can be utilized over the internet as well. This strategy can help you save a lot of bandwidth and time when viewing your website. Before accessing it, a visitor’s browser must unzip the web page using GZIP compression. This approach cuts bandwidth consumption to a significant amount.
8. WordPress database cleanup.
By eliminating extra data, you can shrink the size of your database and backups. To keep your site functioning properly, spam comments, bogus accounts, old drafts of your content, and unwanted plugins and themes must all be removed. Reduce the size of your databases and web files to speed up your WordPress site.
9. Unused plugins should be deactivated or uninstalled.
It’s a waste of space to install extra plugins on your WordPress site. While the backup files are being created, the size of your backup will grow, and the server resources will become overburdened. It’s preferable to delete plugins that aren’t in use and look for alternate ways to automate or schedule tasks—for example, posting your latest updates on social media using third-party services.
10. Pingbacks and trackbacks should be disabled, and external scripts should be kept minimum.
The use of external scripts slows down the overall loading time of your website. As a result, it is best to use a low number of scripts, such as tracking programs (like Google Analytics) or commenting systems (like Reddit or Disqus).
Pingbacks and trackbacks may put an unreasonable amount of strain on your server. The reason for this is that WordPress generates requests for you anytime someone attempts to link to your site. This feature is commonly used in DDoS attacks.
You may disable anything in WP-Admin > Settings > Discussion. And then uncheck the box that says, “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks).” This will make your WordPress run faster.
Conclusion
The most significant advantage of reducing your website’s loading time is that it will considerably improve the experience of your visitors. The scenario is the same whether they use mobile devices or computers. In addition, it will also assist you in achieving a higher ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). After all, lowering your hosting’s bandwidth usage and enhancing client-side site loading speed will not only benefit you in a short period but also in the long run.
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