How to speed up a WordPress website?
A fast web experience is directly proportional to good user experience. The mobile age is fast and impatient. ‘Slow’ is immediately abandoned to never return. That’s the rule of the internet. A website that is blazing fast keeps the visitors engaged and builds trust in your services.
A fast loading website will reduce bounce rate and increase conversions. The user is more satisfied if his needs are fulfilled right-away leading to more profits for you.
If you leave your WordPress website unchecked for a longer period it will grow slower eventually. These website accumulate huge amounts of data and become complex resulting in decreased efficiency. We have created a simple guide on how to speed up WordPress. Use these tips to speed up your website in no time.
- Get Good Hosting
Hosting is where it all begins. The baseline where the speed and performance might get severely affected is hosting. Choosing a hosting plan is the most crucial part for your online presence. From the three available type of hosting services available Shared, Virtual and Dedicated you need to go for what’s best for your website.
In shared hosting your website will be hosted with couple of others on the same server. This plan may be good and cheap while starting out but you may suffer when other sites are facing a lot of traffic and the server has to compromise.
A Virtual Private server is basically similar to a shared server but there are fewer sites on this type of hosting and the resources are evenly distributed as well. Here you also get the option for adding more resources when facing surge in traffic.
A dedicated server although very expensive is a safer option to go for as it is a single server at your disposal and no resources are shared with any other website. A shared server is more secure than others as well.
There is also the option for a cloud server but it is not advisable for businesses that are just starting out. Although it is the smoothest most fastest and flexible server hosting type it is also very expensive.
- Image optimization for Speed
Images are powerful at breathing life into your content and improve viewer engagement. Research shows that colors visuals are more impactful and people are more likely to read your content and spend more time on your website. But if you don’t optimize images for fast loading they could have a negative effect instead. The original raw image format sizes are huge, at-least for a website. You can change that by choosing the right format and the right compression from your editing software to reduce the file size by 1/4t. Several free plug-ins and softwares are available in the market to compress file size without hurting the quality a lot.
- Reduce the number of files.
Few files mean few server requests to download them. A good way to reduce the number of files is to combining them into few larger files that can be downloaded. You may have observed in local machines as well that transferring one large file is always faster than transferring multiple file at the same time, the same principle goes for the web as well.
- Avoid using a lot of plug-ins.
Plug-in’s have a tendency to slow down everything. They are third party and require a whole lot of processing to perform custom tasks. Broken Link Checker is regularly scanning for broken links and other settings that run scans, collect statistics, send email notifications, or powerful plug-in that offer a lot of functions but we only need some of its features. All these mistake may lead to a sluggish website.
- Utilize File Minification on JS and CSS Files.
Minifying is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code without changing its functionality. You may have seen in a CSS file usually neatly organized to make it readable, well that is only for us. Removing that will reduce the file size considerable and boost download time improving overall site performance.
Speed is a very important factor in your websites success. It’s your first impression to the visitor. Making changes to your WordPress website and staying updated is the key to keeping your website blazing fast.