No doubt, WordPress is really the best platform. But the major concern using this platform is page load time. Sometimes it can be too slow if no serious precautions taken. So here in this post, I will cover up best possible ways to speed up WordPress.
Why Website Speed Is So Important
The page loading time is obviously an important part of any website’s user experience. As per study, 47% of visitors expect a page to load in under 2 seconds or less and 40% of visitors abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost them $2.5 million in lost sales every year. Also the page loading time is becoming a more important factor when it comes to search engine rankings as Google now includes site speed in its ranking algorithm.
How To Speed Up WordPress
1. Choose a right web hosting
This is the first and most important to choose the best web hosting option as it has a huge impact on the speed of your website. Never use the free or cheap web hosting, just try to analyse hosting features and performance by going through reviews before choosing right one. Also the websites on cheap shared web hosting suffers due to high DNS response time. If you’re running a WordPress site or planning to start then my suggestion is to never go with shared hosting packages. If you want your website to run quickly, start with a good hosting company and package.
If you want high performance, I personally recommend you to choose WP Engine managed WordPress hosting. The WP Engine give high DNS response time that results very less page load time.
2. Choose a right theme
Themes are also important with WordPress. As we are mostly start with free WordPress themes, it is good to use free themes but always keep in mind that the themes are plays important role to improve performance. But from experience, the premium WordPress themes are best and can make your website fast because is timely updated with required changes. Among premium WordPress themes, Elegant themes are best as it improves page load time from 50%-70%. But when you choose a theme, check the page speed of the theme’s demo, using a tool such as Pingdom, to see how quickly it runs with nothing added to it. This should give you an idea of how well coded it is.
3. Use content delivery network
If you are running a WordPress website with too many images then content delivery network (CDN) is the best solution. The content delivery network (CDN) plays vital role to reduce bandwidth usage and huge improvement in page loading speed. A CDN hosts your website files across a huge network of servers around the world. If a user from Australia visits your website, then they would download files from the server closest to them geographically. Because your bandwidth is spread across so many different servers, the load on any single server is reduced. There are many content delivery network (CDN) but Max CDN is the best. It is very simple to setup Max CDN by going through this guide. Just take few minutes to setup to dramatically improve your page-loading speed.
4. Minify CSS and JavaScipt
Mostly there are many plugins installed with WordPress websites for different purposes that can results your websites links to many individual style sheets and JavaScript files on every page. This is not ideal as it increases page load time due to too many HTTP requests. The better solution is to put all JavaScript files into one JavaScript file and all CSS files in one CSS file to reduce unnecessary HTTP request. WordPress has better way to minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript using WordPress minify plugin.
5. Compress Images
As we are well aware that the images consume most of bandwidth on most websites due to large images that drastically increase page load time. It is highly recommended to compress images in your websites before upload or after upload using WordPress image compress plugins. This is very useful plugin that automatically compresses images as you upload them to the media library while not reducing quality.
6. Effective Caching
Really, Caching is an essential part of any website as it drastically improves website performance. To handle caching with your website, you can use available WordPress caching plugins. I have tried many WordPress cahcing plugins, but I personally suggest you to use WP Super Cache. This is a very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
7. Compress Website
You can compress your website pages to reduce the size of your pages to improve page load performance. You can handle this using same WordPress plguin WP Super Cache to compress pages as well as handling caching. You can also use another WordPress GZIP plugin GZIP compression that automatically compresses your website’s files as ZIP files, saving bandwidth and speeding up page-loading times. When a user visits your website, their browser will automatically unzip the files and show their contents. This method of transmitting content from the server to the browser is far more efficient and saves a lot of time. You can check whether GZIP compression enabled on your website.
8. Optimize your WordPress database
The database optimization is the important to improve your website performance. As we are aware of WordPress autosaves functionlity that saves everything automatically. But it has also a drawback as your database filled with thousands of post revisions, trackbacks, pingbacks, unapproved comments and trashed items very quickly. But there is a solid solution for this using fantastic plugin called WP-Optimize that regularly clears out your database’s trash, keeping the database efficient and filled only with what needs to be kept.
9. Add LazyLoad to your images
If your website has too many images that surely increase your page load time. To overcome this, you can add LazyLoad image concept with your website images to load images visible in the visitor’s browser window. When reader scrolls down, the other images begin to load, just before they come into view. For this, you can use WordPress LazyLoad plugin.
