If we go by what experts say, then there are numerous ways to speed up a WordPress website or for that matter any website. But how one can judge what the best ways are or what are the best tips and tricks to get the best out of your website. Certainly for anyone it can be an interesting topic to discuss because there’s hardly any business left which is not online today. So our intent here is to let you know that what are the simple tricks and tips to enhance the performance of your WordPress website and eventually how could you speed up your website. Let’s get started with this first.
Why should you choose to speed up your website?
As mentioned in the above lines, indeed the reason can be many but before we read out the entire article let’s understand them in detail. Reasons that ring alarm bells can be a major concern for you:
To gain better search results on Google, it is a mandate to have a good speed of your WordPress website. The search engine giants like Google consider websites that are easy to load and have a higher fast-loading page speed. Therefore, in case you want to increase your position in the SERPs, gaining on speed should be one of your precedences.
There are research and case studies conducted to know more about page load time and its role in the performance of the website. These studies indicate that site loading speed of more than 2 seconds or more often does result in around 47% of the visitors that bounce back off the website. Thus, to keep at least half of your audiences or visitors involved you shall buck up with the speed of your WordPress.
Another factor to ponder emphasis on is the impatience that online shoppers or buyers have. Moreover, they expect the page to load in just a second, which is not possible thus to keep the pace with this mindset the WordPress owners should work greatly on speed and performance of their websites.
So how about testing the page load time or the speed of your WordPress website?
Yes, it is crucial because this will indicate how much work needs to be done on your website and what is the scope of improvement. Also, the homepage of the WordPress website is a benchmark to the test the speed of the website. Keep in mind that the speed may differ from page to page, as it relies on several factors, i.e.
- The size of the page
- How many requests in total it creates
- See if it is cached or not
- What kind of content the website host – static or dynamic
In case you want to check the speed of a WordPress website, see the following three tools that are used expansively across the web:
- WebPageTest.org
- Tools.Pingdom.com
- PageSpeed Insights
Okay, let now move to the real business and discussion! Here are few interesting tips and tricks or ways that will increase the speed and performance of your WordPress website:
It’s wise to choose a smart web hosting provider
For a WordPress website, it is important to have a good web hosting provider. This is crucial as the speed of the website also depends on the efficiency of the web hosting because it is the backbone of any website. However, when implementing guidelines or hosting a website we usually miss out on certain key points that can lead to mistakes and could fail to give a good page load time for your website.
Fortunately, the web-hosting providers are professionals and offer great services to the website owners. In order to put your website on the best of the technology and security tools for example cloud hosting services, it is imperative to choose a smart web hosting provider.
Use a frivolous WordPress theme
It is advisable to select a dynamic theme with elements like – widgets, sliders, social icons to name a few. These icons and the themes should be shiny and should catch the viewer’s attention. Once your visitor gets hooked on your theme, your half job is done. But wait, please remember: if they have way apart (too many) elements, the page speed and the page size will go high, eventually this will impact the server to thump. Therefore, the best option is to use simple and lightweight themes, the one that is free (maybe) on WordPress’ or they can be the default themes as well.
Please crunch your desires on the size of the image
We know you love visuals and classy images that give your website an inspiring look. But please make sure your images should not hamper the speed of the website. Let’ not put images that put a pause on the server and web page. The trick is to lessen the size of the images, but without bargaining on the quality.
WP Smush – EWWW Image Optimizer
Use the best eye-catching plugin, plus the ones that immediately reduces the speed of the website by accepting low sized images. There are many plugins, in case you are an amateur then seek help from professionals.
Minify JS and CSS files – this is effective, trust us!
There are chances that we may or may not use pageSpeed insight tool, but in case the website owner is using is via Google PageSpeed Insights tool, then there are possibilities that you will be notified about lessening the size of your CSS and JS files. How does it imply with this article, this is because when you reduce the size of CSS and JS calls from your website your website gets a boost in speed eventually making its performance better.
Get advanced caching mechanisms that have a caching plugin
WordPress caching plugins (e.g. W3 Total Cache) is being in use since a long time. This tool makes the compound tasks a little easier by adding caching rules to your WordPress website. Here if we combine the plug-ins with complex caching mechanisms for example – Varnish, then this could seriously help you in improving the loading speed of the website and ultimately performance is considerably high.
Don’t forget to use a CDN
For each website, content is very important thus, CDN (Content Delivery Networks) assist in keeping the site’s loading speed to a minimum for visitors coming from various countries. Why it helps, is because it keeps a copy of the website in several other data centers that are located in different places.
Before wrapping the article, talking about SSL certificates is equally important as this certificate will determine the safety of your WordPress website. These SSL certificates are issued by certificate authorities – CA that offer strong security on the information that is transmitted from your browser to the server and vice versa. Although some of the SSL certificates are costly, you get cheap SSL certificates as well.
