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5 ways to get a faster loading WordPress website

Back in 2017, we wrote a blog post about how to achieve a faster loading WordPress website where we covered the basics – such as optimising images, caching, spam comment cleansing, fixing broken links, and disabling unnecessary plugins.

As the performance of your site is so important, we decided to write a blog detailing another five ways to cut your website’s 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 choose one of the free themes or pay for a premium theme which tends to offer more features.

Picking a theme for its looks, rather than its functionality, could be a reason 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 tend 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 lots of images, then only those images will load that are in your view. The rest of the pictures will load as you keep scrolling 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 upload an image themselves.

It means that every time someone visits their website, the image they’ve copied the URL for will load by 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 it you want a faster loading WordPress website, make sure you set up hotlinking protection or embed the necessary codes into your .htaccess file.

4. Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks

Pingbacks and trackbacks are a useful way to alert you when your blog or website receives backlinks. However, keeping these core components switched on can cause your server to be 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 datacenters 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 centre.

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 optimise your site to speed up page loading times and provide a seamless user experience for your visitors. As speed can directly affect your sales by increasing conversion rates, it is vital to keep your WordPress site working efficiently.

Take a look at our monthly plans to find out more. It is simple to sign up for single or multiple sites and there are no long- term contracts – and if you’re not 100% happy with our service then we will happily refund your monthly plan payment.

Don’t let slow page loading times lose you customers!

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