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Professional WordPress site owners all want the same thing: a fast-loading WordPress site. In this guide, you’ll learn seven hacks to get a fast-loading site in 2021. A website or blog that loads in less than 1 second is a big deal because it directly affects your website traffic, revenue, and SEO.
A fast-loading WordPress site would have more overall traffic than a slow WordPress site because people have short attention spans and usually click away when a webpage takes too long to load.
This leads to a loss of website visitors, views, and potential revenue from those visitors who clicked away. You’ll be left with a very high bounce rate, which tells Google and other search engines that people don’t like what they see on your site, it’s not high-quality, related content, the webpage has a low user experience score, and so on.
Frankly, no one wants to lose money, and traffic is money in the blogging world. You have a lot of organic traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, Ask, etc. Monetization becomes easy because now you can choose to make money by running adverts on your site or publishing affiliate articles. Either way, you’re sure when people click on your website link, your pages open up super-fast, in record time.
7 Hacks for a Fast-Loading WordPress Site in 2021
Let’s quickly review the seven hacks you need to load your WordPress site super-fast!
1. Use Google Page Insights
A bad WordPress speed checker can give you wrong speed estimates and harmful recommendations that might break your site. That’s why I always recommend using Google Page Insights. Google is the largest search engine in the world, and everyone is essentially writing for Google search.
Using Google Page Insights guarantees accurate page loading speeds and actionable steps to improve your loading speed and create a fast-loading WordPress site.
Another reason to use Google Page Insights is they provide speed tests for both mobile and desktop. After all, Google is now mobile-first because many people are on their phones compared to computers.
Google Page insights give you very detailed data on how your WordPress site loads to the very second!
They also recommend how to make your site load faster. These tasks can be quickly completed with a Google Search to determine how to optimize your site. For example, the first option is to “Eliminate render-blocking resources.” Start by doing a Google search and reading an article.
I usually run another speed test using GTMetrix to compare results and create a priority list for the optimization needed to get me a fast-loading WordPress site.
2. Optimize your Images
Many people forget to optimize their images and use bad image usage practices. This means they load they’re initially fast-loading WordPress site with big, unoptimized images such as sliders, featured images, menu page images, etc.
Unoptimized images with large file sizes significantly impact your website’s loading speed. Visitors have to go through the large file size before the page completely loads, which depends on how fast your website hosting is and the internet used by the website visitor.
There are many WordPress image optimization plugins like Smush or Imagify, and so on. Still, the easiest way is to resize your image before uploading it to your WordPress site and change formats from PNG to JPG so you can save images in small file sizes without losing image quality.
3. Use a Lightweight Responsive WordPress Theme
Lightweight WordPress themes are perfect for SEO and give you a fast-loading WordPress site because the theme files are so small (10KB) that it would take less than a second to load your website completely, unlike heavy WordPress themes with file sizes of 10MB.
Using a Lightweight, responsive WordPress theme means you won’t lose traffic, will have a low bounce rate, make more money with your website, and you’ll get more traffic from search engines like Google.
Examples of Lightweight WordPress themes are GeneratePress, WPAstra, and Genesis Framework.
4. Use a Fast-Loading Hosting Company
Did you know that 90% of most slow websites have bad hosting? It’s one of the textbook reasons websites load slowly: the servers their website files are hosted on are overcrowded, not optimized for speed, or just plain old outdated servers.
One of the fastest ways to instantly improve your WordPress site loading speed is to use a fast-loading hosting company. I recommend reading this WordPress article before making any hosting decisions.
5. Use Google Fonts
This is usually theme-specific, but sometimes, website owners use a custom font for their website’s body text. Maybe they love a particular font or want their blog design to stand out, which is good, but most fail to realize that there are processes to optimize the font so it doesn’t slow down their WordPress site.
6. Optimize your WordPress Database
If you’ve been blogging for years and never optimized your WordPress database, you need to stop everything you’re doing and optimize your database the right way!
Optimizing your WordPress dashboard would ensure WordPress operates in tip-top condition and isn’t a bottleneck for you getting a fast-loading WordPress site. You can install plugins like WP-Optimize to optimize your WordPress database.
7. Delete Old WordPress Articles
Old “DEAD” articles, especially when you have thousands of spurned or copied content you know, haven’t gotten any traffic or generated any affiliate revenue in years. Still, they are sitting pretty on your WordPress site; please delete them.
If they are small, you can always try content upgrade options like researching and adding more original words to the article, but if they are in the hundreds and thousands, please delete them. They will stop your dream of having a fast-loading WordPress Site in 2021.
Conclusion
With these seven simple hacks, you can make your site a fast-loading WordPress site in 2021. Remember that it starts with checking your current page speed using Google Page Insights. There are other more in-depth ways to speed up your WordPress site, but this is the beginner-friendly version.
Guest Author Bio: Paul Aroloye is a humble blog owner and part-time YouTuber. He lives in Lagos, Nigeria, and writes about how to make money blogging at nairatips.com. You can connect with him on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.