Speeding up a WordPress website is a hot topic because it’s the preferred platform for millions of bloggers and online businesses. Fortunately, there are so many ways bloggers can successfully speed up their WordPress sites.
You enjoy your site more when it’s performing at its best, and your visitors will too. To know your site is not at its best, you should look out for warning signs.
For instance, if you used to rank high on SERPs and all of a sudden you’re not, you should find out if it’s because of your loading time.
When you boost your site’s speed, more visitors are likely to click on your site. Ideally, a website shouldn’t take more than 2 seconds to load. If users click off, your bounce rate will increase and your SEO ranking will be lowered because of it.
Users want sites that load as soon as they click on the link. This is especially true when you’re selling products and services. Online buyers are quite impatient because there are many other options out there.
To capture the attention of your audience, you should always prioritize website speed. Let us look at the tips you can implement to make this possible.
1. Choose a Reputable WordPress Web Hosting Provider
The web hosting provider you choose for your WordPress will play a large part in determining how fast your website will be. Each time you’re considering web hosting providers for WordPress, avoid shared hosting services.
Most new bloggers go for this option because they offer unlimited space, emails, bandwidth, and domains.
Though shared web hosting plans offer unlimited storage, subdomains and other features, you need to be sure that your chosen hosting provider is reliable. Shared hosting is so affordable because multiple users share the resources of a single server. That means a high-traffic surge of another site can affect you.
When you choose a reputable web hosting provider for your WordPress project, you get excellent performance which is what every blogger is looking for. Hosting dedicated for WordPress will save you from shared hosting issues that come with several other websites.
Also, you need a web hosting provider with competitive prices and packages that ensure you can personalize your blogging experience.
What people fail to remember is that working on a shared server has you vulnerable to resource issues unrelated to your site. If you have an individualized server, you can go as far as optimizing it to ensure nothing compromises the site’s speed.
The web hosting industry has greatly advanced and because of this, website owners have access to affordable cloud hosting solutions.
Read more: Cloud Hosting vs Shared Hosting
2. Use a Lightweight Theme
The themes on WordPress have impressive widgets, elements, and social icons you can use to personalize your site. These dynamic and shiny elements need to be used with moderation because overloading your site will likely slow it down.
The more elements you use, the higher your page sizes will be and it doesn’t take rocket science to understand that such pages take ages to load.
To prevent your server from taking a thumping, take your time when you’re choosing the elements you want to use.
The best solution for these scenarios is using lightweight themes. The default WordPress themes are ideal.
3. Reduce Image Sizes
Did you know that images are a major contributor to the size of a web page? You heard that right! Visual media more often than not affect the speed of websites without owners even knowing it.
The trick is to manually optimize every image before you upload it. As you optimize your images, make sure the quality is not compromised. There are quite a number of tools out there you make use to make this possible.
In fact, here are WordPress plugins that allow you to this:
4. Minify JS and CSS files
In case you’re using Google PageSeed to check out your site’s performance, you’ll get notifications to help you minimize the size of your JS and CSS files. When you reduce the number of calls in these files, you automatically improve the speed of your site.
Aside from these prompts, you can do this manually if you know your way around WordPress themes. Google actually provides you with guidelines to help you with the entire process. Not to mention the several available plugins designed to auto-optimize CSS and JS files.
5. Use Advanced Caching Mechanisms
Adding caching to your site elements is quite easy because of WordPress caching plugins that have been around since time immemorial. All you have to do is add a caching plugin and set it up. This setup will store some of your site’s static files on the visitor’s browser, which will improve your site’s load time for recurring visitors.
You can check out a plugin like WP Rocket.
6. Use a CDN
Lastly, make sure you use CDN because people that visit your site come from different parts of the world. The further away a visitor is from where your site is hosted, the longer the loading time will be.
However, when you use CDN, you can achieve a minimum loading speed regardless of where visitors are located. Content Delivery Networks function by keeping a copy of your website in different datacenters all over the world. This way, the loading time is significantly reduced.
Wrapping Up
The loading speed of your site is very important because it determines how high you’ll rank on Google’s SERPs. These tips we’ve outlined ensure that you always optimize your WordPress site’s speed.
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This article was submitted to us by a third-party writer. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views and opinions of ThisHosting.Rocks. If you want to write for ThisHosting.Rocks, go here.
This post was last modified on July 16, 2020 5:05 pm
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Cool! Thanks