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A sluggish website can adversely affect the user experience of your website; it even frustrates your users to exit your web pages.
According to a study by Kissmetrics, 47% of users expect a web page to load within 2 seconds. If this does not scare you, another study found that a one-second delay in page load time can decrease the conversion rate by 7%.
The importance of website performance and speed has grown, and even Google urges webmasters to ensure faster website loading. The basics of improving WordPress performance and speed do not require any complicated code. This article provides seven easy and practical tips for improving your website speed.
Things to know before taking action to optimize the speed
The most common reasons that slow down the speed of your website are:
- Outdated WordPress
- WordPress plugins
- Uncompressed images
- External scripts
- Website Hosting
After testing your WordPress speed using PageSpeed Insights by Google or any other speed testing tool, you can work on the following to speed up WordPress.
Effective Fixes for Improving WordPress Performance
Now that you know your website speed and the common factors that usually affect its performance, let’s look at some factors that can improve it.
Choose an SEO Optimized & Fast Loading Theme
Choosing a WordPress theme may or may not be in your hands as a business owner. However, it would be best if you made sure the theme your website is using is SEO-friendly and not bloated with features that make the website’s loading speed sluggish.
A critical factor to consider before selecting a theme is ensuring it is built quickly and has only the essential attributes for your business.
The fast-loading theme providers are CSSIgniter, StudioPress, TeslaThemes, and more. But that’s not it; make sure the theme you are installing has been set up with speed in mind and minimal CSS requests.
WordPress Caching Plugin
A powerful caching plugin will certainly move the needle for your WordPress website. Since WordPress pages are generated dynamically, a caching plugin generates a static version on your server. This static version is pulled every time a user requests a page, minimizing the processing of PHP scripts.
There are many WordPress caching plugins on the market. Some notable ones are WP Rocket, a premium plugin, and WP Super Cache, a free Automattic plugin used by over 2 million websites.
In addition to these plugins, you can use their free caching solutions if you use web hosting such as SiteGround, Bluehost, or any other.
Keep WordPress Updated
This is one of the primary and effective fixes for improving website speed and performance. The WordPress team is constantly improving the platform. Now and then, they release a significant core update or a minor update fixing small bugs.
Updating the WordPress core is easy, and most hosting solutions take care of it automatically. However, you can also update the WordPress core yourself.
In the WordPress dashboard, scroll down to the bottom right of the screen and check out the version of the WordPress you are using.
If your version is not the latest, you can scroll up, select Dashboard from the left-hand menu, and then click Updates. If your website is not running the newest version of WordPress, it will be written that you need to update to the latest version of WordPress.
Choose the Top WordPress Hosting
Website hosting can make or break your website. A lot depends upon the quality of the web hosting on which your website is hosted. Good web hosting will take all necessary measures to ensure an optimized and fast-loading website.
The two types commonly used are shared hosting and managed WordPress hosting. Shared hosting is a popular choice, and as the name suggests, the servers are shared among different websites. The downside of shared hosting is that if a neighboring website receives vast amounts of traffic, the chances are your resources will be minimized, reducing the speed of your website.
On the other hand, managed WordPress hosting ensures that the website has the most optimized servers and features, such as automatic backups, advanced website security, and more.
Use Optimized Images to Improve Website Performance
Images are an essential part of creating engaging content. Without creative and good-looking images, the content itself does not look appealing. However, images are the most common reason for a beginner or professional webmaster to slow down a page’s speed.
Large-sized images take longer to load on a page. Therefore, using an image optimization plugin or manually compressing images improves page speed remarkably. To compress an image manually, you can upload the image to TinyPNG, which uses clever lossy compression techniques to minimize the size of your image.
On the other hand, you can install a plugin like reSmush or EWWW Image Optimizer, which are built to automatically optimize images as soon as they are uploaded to your website.
Break Comments Into Pages
Getting lots of comments on your pages is a dream come true. The more comments your pages get, the lower the page bounce rate. However, a more significant number of comments results in greater load time.
The ideal solution to this fortunate problem is splitting comments into pages. This can easily be managed by changing your “Discussion” settings from the dashboard.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
This may sound too technical initially, but deploying a CDN does not require a developer.
A Content Delivery Network has servers worldwide, and each server renders a static page to the nearby country whenever a request is made. This allows for fast website loading. This is mainly because a CDN ensures the requested page is delivered from the nearest server to the user, requiring less time to provide content to the user’s browser. You can check out this infographic, which provides a detailed description of a CDN.
CDNs are not cheap, but Cloudflare provides free CDN service powered by 115 data centers. They are among the most reliable web performance and website security companies.
Takeaway For Improving WordPress Performance
Improving WordPress performance and speed is essential. Even if your website loads at the optimal time, it is always good to be vigilant and monitor it constantly for possible issues. For expert help, check out our WordPress Speed Optimization Service.