Cons Of Not To Speed Up WordPress
When it comes to setting up your first WordPress website, it is important that you ensure that your pages load fast since online users often do not stick around if the pages take more time to load. Thus we are going to tell you how to speed up WordPress website. Choose premium WordPress themes from VWthemes for the best and easy website creation experience.
There are a few things that you can do to enhance the performance of your website and in the process, help boost the conversion rate on your pages.
According to Bing, even a 2% drop in page responsiveness results in reduced customer satisfaction and those customers are not bound to return back to your website anytime soon.
As per a recent research, it has been found that most online users rarely spend more than a few seconds surfing websites online.
That works out to a few seconds per page and if your website takes longer to load, then you are going to lose out in terms of probable customers and traffic too. This is why you need to check out how to speed up WordPress, ways to begin with. Even with this also learn about Automatic WordPress Backup with VW Themes.
What Slows Down Your WordPress Website?
Learning what slows down your website is the key to optimising performance and making smarter long-term decisions.
The major causes for a slow WordPress website are:
- Web Hosting: When your web hosting server is not properly configured it can hurt your website speed up WordPress.
- WordPress Configuration: If your WordPress site is not serving cached pages, then it will overload your server hence causing your website to be slow or crash entirely.
- Page Size: Primarily images that aren’t optimized for web.
- Bad Plugins: If you’re using a poorly coded plugin, then it can slow down your website significantly.
- External scripts: External scripts such as ads, font loaders, etc can also have a big impact on your website performance in speed up wp basis.
Now that you know what slows down your WordPress website, let’s take a look at how to speed up WordPress website.
Ways For Speed Up WordPress For Faster Website Experience
- Good Host
To ensure that you have a good web host in place is the first thing that you need to do. You can always opt for shared hosting but this leads to more often than not sluggish load times which is why it makes sense to invest in a good web hosting plan.
A sluggish load time can put an impact on your competitiveness in the long run so investing in a good web host makes more sense.
- Solid Theme
It is important that you go with lightweight WordPress themes as it can help speed up WordPress site loading.
Basically, a basic theme that comes loaded with advanced functionality, and with basic features so that it gets indexed faster and the load time is lightning fast is what you need.
Just remember that the more plugins you have on your pages, the longer it will take to load which unavoidably leads to loss of prospective customers. This is actually an important step in helping one on speed up WordPress website.
- Content Delivery Network
One of the great things about content delivery network or CDNs as they are known is that it allows your customers to download all the static files on your website a lot faster. This should result in improved performance than before of your website as a whole which is why it makes sense to opt for a content delivery network; they are reasonably priced and easy to set up as well.
- Optimize Images
These days, all your website content needs to be optimized. No longer, a case of just optimizing the textual content on your website it is. Quite a few plugins there are including the WP-SmushIT which enables you to optimize the image as you upload it.
There are other plugins that you can use as well which should enable you to optimize the images automatically and without any difficulty.
- Optimize Home Page
You can also boost your homepage to ensure that it loads faster. For starters, you can make sure that your homepage carries extracts rather than whole posts, reduce the number of posts on your home page (5-7), remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page, and remove inactive or less used widgets and plugins that you do not need from your home page.
You can also keep the overall number of widgets and plugins on your website to a minimum as the readers are here mostly for the content. Since homepage contains your main SEO keyword you should focus on homepage primarily to speed up WordPress and then on other pages.
- Optimize Your WordPress Database
That you need to optimize your WordPress database is one of the reasons that your WordPress site is sluggish. The good news is that like the WP-Optimize plugin there are a few plugins designed just for this purpose. This plugin enhances your database so that your website continues to run efficiently and smoothly with faster load times than before.
- Disable Hot Linking Or Leeching
Online users usually scrape images off your content and this is often termed as hot linking or leeching. And this inevitably places more stress on your server and in effect your website load sluggishly.
The one way to avoid this is to head over to your root directory, access your ht access file and include the code. Place code in your root .htaccess file and disable hot linking of images with forbidden or custom image option.
You’ll notice I included my feed (from FeedBurner), you’ll need to replace it with your feed’s name, and else your images won’t appear correctly there.
- Expires Header
By adding expires header, you get to specify how much time that other users’ browsers have to fetch static content such as JavaScript pages among others from your WP website. This should enable you to function uninterruptedly and in the process, get your pages to load a lot faster.
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