Quick loading web pages always improve the user experience, double-up your page views and help getting good rank in search engines. By using some very simple optimization tips you can boost WordPress website’s speed, which can directly improve the performance of your website.
Why You Need Speed For Your WordPress Website?
We all know, that the load on internet and every website is increased like anything in past few years. The number of internet users have increased to multiple times, which directly affect the speed of web pages. When you have more users, trying to open your website then there should be less loading time for each one.
If your website is slow then users will leave your website even before the page will load completely. According to surveys, many big E-commerce website’s one second delay in loading can lead to loss in conversion, page views or may be customer satisfaction.
Most importantly, Google and other search engines have already started sorting and pushing such websites down in search results because of the loading time. So it overall, affect your ranking, business and online presence.
How You Can Check The Speed Of Your WordPress Website?
Your website is performing well on your computer, it get open without any delay whenever you open it on your pc; it doesn’t mean that website is doing well. It is just because you frequently open your page, so your browser has saved your website cache and automatically pre-fetch it, as soon as you type your web address. This is the reason, your website don’t take time to load on your computer.
Whereas, any other random user, who is visiting your website for the first time can experience the problem while loading or while navigating. This speed can also get differ in distinctive regions. To boost WordPress website’s speed, there are some tools, which help determining the speed of your web page.
The tool is free online to download and check the speed of your website. This test exactly shows up, how your page is performing? A good page load time is less than 2 seconds. If it is more than 2 seconds then your page needs to get optimized.
You can make it faster as much as possible. The faster website will eventually deliver you better results. Even a few milliseconds of improvement can add quality to your website.
Factors Which Slow Down The Speed Of Your WordPress Website
As soon as you do the speed test, it starts giving you multiple recommendations for improvement. Albeit, many of them are not useful; especially for beginners. So first of all, try to find out what is impeding the speed of your website.
Here are few causes behind the low speed of your page:
- Web Hosting: If your web hosting server is not well structure configured then it starts reducing the speed of the web page.
- WordPress Configuration: If the WordPress site is not serving the cached pages, then it overload the server and then it needs badly to boost WordPress website’s speed.
- Page Size: Many pages are not optimized for the web. Such pages take time to load.
- Bag Plugins: If the plugin you are using, is not structured and reliable; then it can significantly reduce the speed.
- External Scripts: Ads and other such external scripts can be a reason in reducing the speed of your WordPress website.
After you know the reason behind the poor speed of the website, you can start working on it to boost WordPress website’s speed.
Good WordPress Hosting And Performance Of The Website
The WordPress hosting is directly proportional to your website’s performance. A good hosting place takes extra measures to optimize your website to its better performance.
When you choose a shared hosting for your website, then you share the resources with other customers. So if any of other website has huge traffic then it can impact entire server and then to the performance of your website too.
However, a managed and dedicated web hosting gives you the accurate and optimized server configuration to run your WordPress website. These service providers also offer backup services, WordPress updates and security configurations for overall protection and performance of the website and to boost WordPress website’s speed.
Steps To Speed Up The WordPress Website
Increasing the speed of your WordPress website is easy, that too no coding required. So everyone can do this without having coding knowledge.
1. Install A Compatible Caching Plugin
WordPress pages are made dynamic for your viewers. The WordPress store a lot data and then make it visible to your audience, the way you want. This process require a huge space, which ultimately reduce the speed of the web page.
This is the reason why every WordPress site should use a caching plugin. This caching plugin make your website two to five times faster.
These plugins don’t repeat the entire loading process again and again. Instead, they copy the page information and whenever your user try to open the page it serves the cached version to every subsequent user.
It is an amazing booster to boost WordPress website’s speed.
2. Optimize Images
Images are the most important part of any website. They create engagement among your users. But these images take a notable space and decrease the speed of the page.
Un-optimized images can hurt the speed of the page badly. They are the main factor that vanishes the speed of your page. So before you upload any image to your web page, try optimizing it. Use image optimizing tools and make the images compatible for your website.
Don’t upload them in their original format, rather, change their formats and then upload them. This process can boost WordPress website’s speed up to 5 times. JPEG and PNG images need a huge space and they take time to load, whereas the compressed formats are faster and they don’t reduce the speed.
3. Keep Your Site Updated
This is the age of data and updated data. You cannot serve the same old data to your customers. If you don’t update your website regularly then you will start losing your customer base. Because they have the updated information on other websites.
WordPress keep on updating their back-end process in an every while to fix the security issues and bugs. Also themes and plugins all get updated regularly. All you need to do is, keep updating the back-end and front-end of your website to attract the traffic towards your website.
4. Optimize Background Process
This is one of the scheduled tasks, which keep running in the background of your website. For example, WordPress backup plugin tasks, to publish scheduled posts, check for updates, search engines and other crawlers for fetching content and many more.
Tasks like scheduled posts and updates don’t impact the speed much but backup plugins and excessive crawling by search engines definitely slow down the website speed and then you need to boost WordPress website’s speed. So optimize the background processes and make these tasks periodic.
5. Use Excerpts And Archives
WordPress shows full content of each article on your homepage. This increases home page content and slows down the speed. Another disadvantage of this, is that visitor don’t feel like to move further inside to read the article because he get the insight of the article on home page only. This eventually reduces the page views and increases the bounce rate.
So, to boost the WordPress website’s speed you can add excerpts on home page instead showing full content. It can be done in the settings in no time.
6. Avoid Uploading Audio/Video Files Directly To The Website
If you directly upload the audio or video to the website to display them in HTML player, so this is a mistake you are making. Hosting audio/video needs bandwidth and it will cost you a huge sum of amount. Another thing is hosting large media files increases your backup size and make it difficult for WordPress to restore it.
Instead, try using some audio/video hosting service like YouTube and let it handle the audio and video because they are into this work, so they do it without any problem and on uncompromised quality.
Also, WordPress has an in-built video embedded feature to copy and paste the video’s URL directly on your website. It gives better performance of the website and boost WordPress website’s speed.
Now try applying these techniques to speed the load time and improve the performance of the website.
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