In today’s digital landscape, everything revolves around speed and efficiency. Fortunately, there are solutions for enhancing your website’s performance. And, of all website performance difficulties, poor loading speed is one of the major causes of people leaving your WordPress website.
If your website takes longer to load than it should, your visitors will suffer as a result. To help you out, we’ve rounded up some effective strategies for enhancing the performance of your WordPress site.
How to Boost WordPress Site Speed
Now, let’s look at some practical strategies you can use to speed up your WordPress site.
1. Use Quick WordPress Hosting
One of the most crucial things you can do to increase the speed of your site’s backend is to select performance-optimized WordPress hosting. If your web hosting is slow, your website is likely to be slow as well, even if you do an excellent job with your front-end optimization.
When selecting a host, also consider the available server locations. Because physical distance influences download speeds, the actual location of your server will affect page load times.
Ideally, choose a host that has a server in the same location as your primary target audience. Another essential factor to consider is the use of new technologies such as HTTP/2, which can increase HTTPS speed while simultaneously managing a large number of tiny HTTP requests.
2. Use GZIP to Compress Files
GZIP is a popular lossless compression technique for transferring data over the internet. It can reduce file sizes by up to 70% and compresses data in a fraction of the time and computing power required by other compression techniques.
When you use GZIP compression on your website, your files will be sent to consumers significantly faster because you are using far less bandwidth than an uncompressed file. There are several plugins available to allow GZIP compression on your site.
It’s a typical feature of performance optimization plugins that makes the process as easy as ticking a box.
3. Install a Caching Plugin for WordPress
Page caching is one of the most important things you can do to improve the efficiency of your WordPress site, especially if you’re starting with inexpensive shared hosting. If you’re on a low-cost shared hosting plan, installing caching might slash your load times.
Normally, when someone views your WordPress site, the server must recreate each page from scratch. This requires executing PHP to “build” the page and scanning your site’s database for the page’s content.
Following that, your server transmits the finished HTML to a visitor’s browser. This operation consumes time and resources. Page caching solves this problem by storing the completed HTML output of a page in a cache.
There are many caching plugins available on the market, such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and many more. They are all well-liked and constantly updated.
4. Select a Fast and Lightweight Theme
There are several excellent WordPress themes available to assist you in creating a visually appealing and functional website. The variety of alternatives, ranging from free simple themes to pricey complicated theme packages, can be overwhelming.
If loading speed is important to you, look for the fastest WordPress themes on the market. Keep in mind that feature-rich themes carry extensive code that needs to load every time a visitor lands on your website. So, if you want a faster WordPress site, go minimalist and choose a theme that features only the basics required to work properly.
5. Consider Lazy-Loading Your Content
If your WordPress site has a large number of photos, you may also use slow loading. Lazy loading loads just the pictures that display in the user’s browser window when the website initially loads, deferring loading the remainder until the user scrolls down to them.
Lazy loading creates the illusion of a quicker page load time by allowing your content to load gradually rather than expecting your browser to complete all of the loading work at once. It can be extended to additional media, such as video embeds, as well as page content, such as text and comments.
6. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) reduces global load times for your website by caching static material on a massive network of “edge” servers located all over the world. When someone accesses your site, the material is downloaded from the nearest edge location rather than from your primary server.
The files download faster, and your site loads faster since the physical distance is smaller. Many WordPress hosts additionally provide free CDN services as part of their package.
You can set up a CDN in two simple steps:
- Enroll in the CDN service and add your website.
- Configure your WordPress site to load certain material via the CDN using a plugin such as CDN Enabler.
7. Optimize Images
Images account for a significant amount of your page weight. As a result, improving them can make a major impact on your site’s performance. Given the significance of page speed for both search rankings and user experience, this is a critical area to nail.
Image optimization plugins for WordPress sites are able to efficiently and consistently optimize image size for page performance. However, one thing to bear in mind is that you shouldn’t utilize more than one image optimization plugin. Using many image plugins at once might have unintended results and complications.
In most cases, using a WordPress caching plugin in conjunction with an image optimization plugin results in a fast WordPress website.
8. Limit Plugin Usage and Fast Plugins
There are so many wonderful plugins available, but you have to be mindful of your plugin usage if you want to speed up your site. Every plugin you install, in general, adds its weight in the form of database queries, HTTP requests, and file size.
As a result, it’s a safe rule of thumb to assume that the more plugins you install, the slower your site will be. However, it’s not just the number of plugins that is important but also their quality. Even a single sluggish plugin can have a significant negative impact on your site’s load speed.
9. Reduce the Size of CSS and JavaScript Files
CSS and JavaScript are essential to any site; they take your pages beyond the confines of simple HTML. These files must be transmitted from your web server to a web browser whenever a visitor opens a page.
As a result, the smaller these files are (without impacting the design and functioning of your site), the faster your pages will load.
Final Thoughts
Beyond all we’ve looked at, keep in mind that there is no universal recipe for a super-fast website. It all comes down to testing and retesting, and above all, striking a balance between what we need our site to give and how quickly we can do it.
As web designers, our goal is sometimes to blow our audience’s minds, but other times we jeopardize speed. But it is exactly inside constraints that creativity and inventiveness bloom.
Author Bio
Jordan Smith is a veteran web designer based in Tulsa, OK with more than 10 years of experience in designing and developing websites. He believes in providing honest, reliable and efficient web design services to businesses of any size and has built hundreds of custom websites tailored specifically to each client’s brand and goals.
