Top 5 Simple Ways to Speed up your WordPress Website

 

Do you want to speed up WordPress so that your site visitors have a better user experience and your search results improve? In this digital age, having a fast-loading WordPress website is critical to your success. After all, 48% of consumers want websites to load in less than 2 seconds. Furthermore, 60% of visitors will quit your site if it takes more than three seconds to load.

The speed of your website has the power to make or destroy your conversions. It has the potential to affect your search rankings. It will also impact how long visitors will stay on your website to discover what you have to offer.

Why Speed up your site:

The typical individual has an attention span of 8 seconds, according to Microsoft. In other words, internet users do not have the time to browse through all of your stuff. If they do read your information, they will most likely merely skim it.

People aren't going to sit around waiting for your website to load.

Not to mention, according to a Strange Loop case study including Google, Amazon, and other prominent websites, a 1-second delay in page loading time can result in a 6% loss in conversions, 12% fewer page visits, and a 17% fall in customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, Google and other search engines have long penalised sluggish loading websites with lower results since they do not give an amazing customer experience.

What Slows Down in Your Website:

So you already know that if you want higher search results and more traffic, subscribers, leads, and sales, you need a fast-loadingWordPress website.

Understanding the most prevalent causes of website slowness can help direct your attempts to enhance it for speed and performance.

 Here are the main reasons your WordPress isn't loading as quickly as you'd like:

      ·       Low-quality web hosting

·       Page sizes that aren’t optimized for the web

·       Huge images that take forever to load and drag your page speeds down with them

·       External scripts such as font loaders, ads, and more

·       Poorly coded WordPress plugins 

Of course, this is not an entire list of factors that may slow down your website. However, it's enough to give you an understanding so that when you go through our list of site performance improvement ideas, you'll notice the links.

·      Choose a High-Quality Web Hosting Provider

There are several web hosting options available to self-hosted WordPress users. However, in terms of site speed and performance, what works for one may not work for another.

Your web host should take steps to speed up your website. For example, with a good web host, you may get:

o   Free CDN services

o   Server-side caching solutions

o   Built-in image compression and optimization tools

o   Top of the line hardware

o   WordPress optimized servers

o   Expert WordPress support

o   Support for PHP 7 or higher

Slow loading times are mostly caused by shared web hosting options. This is because everyone on a shared server shares a limited number of resources. The minute someone draws more resources for himself, the other sites being hosted on that server suffer. As a result, if you're going to use shared hosting, go with a reputable provider like Bluehost or Site Ground. 

·      Utilize a CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) will assist you in rapidly delivering your site's content to visitors all around the world. CDNs use servers all around the world to keep copies of your website on each of them. When a person visits your website, the server that is geographically nearest to the site visitor instantly sends your site's content.

Furthermore, CDNs assist to mitigate DDoS assaults and keep your website from failing. During a DDoS assault, thousands of requests are directed at a single server in an effort to bring it down, as well as every website hosted on that server.

If you utilise a CDN, however, when one server fails due to an attack, another server will simply pick up the slack and distribute your site's content without missing a beat. 

·      Use a Caching Plugin

Your WordPress webpages are 'dynamic,' which means they are always changing. When someone visits your website, WordPress must create your webpages from scratch. It accomplishes this by locating the code, assembling it, and presenting it on a computer screen in a form that site visitors can comprehend.

As you might expect, repeating this process has the potential to really slow things down.

If you instal a WordPress caching plugin, your website will not have to be rebuilt every time someone comes. Instead, when someone visits your website, it will save a duplicate of it in a cache. Then, the next time this individual visits your website, the cached (or, previously put together) version of your site will appear instantaneously for them.

          Here are a few of the top WordPress caching plugins available:

o  WP Super Cache (free)

o  W3 Total Cache (free)

o  WP Fastest Cache (free)

o  WP Rocket (premium)

 

·      Update Everything

WordPress core, themes, and plugins are all updated for security reasons. Though this is essential, ensuring sure everything is up to date also allows you to leverage performance enhancements.

Each update will include new features as well as fixes for security and bug issues. It will also include speed and performance improvements that you can take advantage of by simply upgrading them.

Just remember to keep backups of your site before making any substantial changes to it. You never know when a rogue update will take your site down. Don't put all of your hard work at danger because you didn't have a solid backup on hand. Check out this overview of the top WordPress backup plugins for assistance with site backups.

If the notion of constantly upgrading everything on your website bothers you, don't worry; there are lots of respected managed WordPress web hosting available to assist you with updating your core, themes, and plugins. (For example, Flywheel, Pagely, and WP Engine).

·      Deactivate and Uninstall Unused Plugins and Themes

We've all seen how simple it is to instal and activate the most recent WordPress themes and plugins. However, having themes and plugins on your website is one of the simplest ways to bloat your web files.

Furthermore, it increases the size of your site backups. And, if you have automatic site backups set up to keep your data secure (which you should! ), the larger the backup and the greater the demand on your server's resources.

And did we mention that using the improper themes or plugins on your website might lead to security flaws and technical troubles, such as a website crash?

Well, they can. As useful as WordPress themes and plugins are, if you're not careful, they may do more than just improve the appearance and functionality of your website.

The answer to resolving this issue is to employ as many complete plugins as feasible (to achieve two or more goals with one plugin). You should also go over your installs on a regular basis and remove anything you're not using. It makes no sense to allow themes and plugins to take up space on your site when they aren't required.

How to Test Your Website Speed

Before you begin optimizing your WordPress website for performance, you need first understand where your website is right now. Remember that just because your site loads rapidly in your browser doesn't guarantee it will for every site visitor who visits your site.

In fact, modern browsers, such as Chrome, cache your website and pre-fetch it as soon as you begin typing in the URL. That implies your site will load almost immediately.

This may not be the case for a first-time visitor to the site. As a result, it's best to use a Google site speed test like Page Speed Insights assess your site's performance (and get advice).

You may do this free online speed test to examine how quickly your desktop and mobile pages load.