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In 2017, we wrote a blog post about achieving a faster-loading WordPress website. We covered the basics: optimizing images, caching, spam comment cleansing, fixing broken links, and disabling unnecessary plugins.
Because your site’s performance is so important, we wrote a blog detailing five other ways to reduce load time.
A faster-loading WordPress website will be more attractive to customers and to search engines, leading to an improved user experience and higher SEO score.
1. Chose a lightweight theme
The beauty of WordPress is that there are so many different themes to choose from. You can select one of the free themes or pay for a premium theme that offers more features.
Picking a theme for its looks rather than functionality could be why your WordPress website is slow. A theme with more features means unnecessary styles and scripts that slow your site down. A lightweight theme may have limited features but tends to load faster.
2. Implement Lazy Load for photos
Lazy Load is a popular tool to cut the loading time of your WordPress site. It stops any images you use from loading when they are not being viewed. For example, if your website has many photos, only those images in your view will load. The rest of the pictures will load as you scroll down the web page.
3. Enable hotlink protection
Have you heard of hotlinking? It’s when someone uses your images on their website by copying the full URL of your image and embedding it in their code rather than uploading an image themselves.
It means that whenever someone visits their website, the image they’ve copied the URL for will load using your bandwidth. It is essentially a way for individuals to use your bandwidth rather than their own.
Hotlinking will affect your site’s load time, so if you want a faster-loading WordPress website, set up hotlinking protection or embed the necessary codes into your .htaccess file.
4. Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks are helpful ways to alert you when your blog or website receives backlinks. However, keeping these core components switched on can put your server under constant strain.
This is because when your site is mentioned, it generates loads of requests that keep going back and forth. Thankfully, you can achieve the same insights with tons of other tools
5. Use a content delivery network
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) stores your website’s copy in data centers across the globe. This means that if your original website is located in England and someone from Australia accesses your website, then through CDN, they will be accessing your website’s copy from the nearest data center.
This is useful for individuals whose target audience spans different geographical locations.
A faster-loading WordPress website can provide benefits from a customer perspective as well as help you rank better by search engines.
WP Tech Support can optimize your site to speed up page loading times and provide a seamless user experience for your visitors. Speed can directly affect your sales by increasing conversion rates, so keeping your WordPress site working efficiently is vital.
Take a look at WordPress maintenance plans to find out more. Signing up for a single or multiple site is simple, with no long-term contracts. We will happily refund your monthly plan payment if you’re not 100% happy with our service.
Don’t let slow page loading times lose you customers!