Quick Tips to Speed Up Your WordPress Website in 20 minutes
As we all know, the speed of a website strongly impacts its performance and the business’s bottom line. Most of the users leave a slow website in frustration when it takes longer to load. A fast-loading website takes higher ranks on search engines too. Speed impacts the ranking of web pages on search results. Therefore, Google recommends website owners to keep the load time up to 3 seconds. If a website loads fast, it acquires a higher chance of appearing in the top search results.
It’s high time you should consider optimizing your website speed up to the required standard. WordPress takes an edge over other website builders as it powers over 40.0% of the website on the web. You can simply improve your WordPress website speed by following some quick tips and speed improvement.
Check Your Website Speed
Using speed test tools is a useful way to determine your site’s speed. Depending on your geographical location, the speed may also differ.
To test loading time, websites usually use their homepage as a benchmark. If you need to test the speed of a website, you can use WebPageTest.org or Tools.Pingdom.com. If the speed of your website is slower or takes more than a few seconds to load, you should optimize your WordPress website speed on your first priority. You can definitely take the following quick steps to fix your site’s speed, retain more visitors, and make the most of your business.
Invest in High-Performance WordPress Hosting
You will need a WordPress host to store all of the data for your website. Your images, videos, and other content reside on a server in the data center of the web host when you sign up for their services. WordPress hosts make it easy for you to access, manage, and route your data to your visitors. The right choice is critical right from the beginning, or else, you’ll have problems and waste time in the future. You will simply waste a lot of time and effort if you don’t select the right website hosting company.
Improve Image Size Optimization
The major contributors to an increase in website size are images. It is important to reduce the size of images without compromising their quality.
You can optimize the images manually using Photoshop, Chrome Page Speed Insights extension or any other image resize tool. However, this process may take longer than usual to do the task. As an alternative, you can also use image optimization plugins on your WordPress website site. This will drastically reduce image sizes and improve the website speed.
Make Use of Lazy Loading
If your blog posts contain multiple images, video embeds, and photo galleries, then lazy loading can be beneficial.
Lazy loading downloads only those images and videos that will be seen by the user initially, instead of downloading all of them at once. With this plugin, all other images and videos are replaced by placeholder images.
Consider Using A CDN
Your website visitors come from all over the world, so it’s obvious that the loading speed varies if the visitors are located far from where your website is hosted. Thus, loading times for your site may vary depending on their location. CDN refers to a Content Delivery Network. CDNs minimize the time it takes for pages to load for visitors coming from various countries. CDNs store copies of your website in several data centers located around the world. Serving the webpage from the nearest point of origin is the primary function of a CDN.
Disable or Uninstall Plugins
Your WordPress websites will fill up with a lot of junk if you use unwanted plugins. Furthermore, the size of your backup will increase, and you will put a heavy load on your servers while the backups are generated. The best practice is to delete plugins you aren’t using and look for alternate ways to automate or schedule tasks. Instead, you can share the latest posts on social media. Zapier and IFTTT are two web services that automate these functions and reduce the resource requirements on your website and server.
Divide comments into pages
Is your blog receiving lots of comments? Great! This is an indication that your audience is engaged. It will slow down your site, though, as all those comments load simultaneously.
WordPress has an integrated solution for this. To break comments into pages, simply select the “Break comments into pages” option under Settings » Discussion.
Minimize The Use of External Scripts
External scripts add a lot of data to your web page total, which is what takes the longest to load. To reduce the number of scripts on your site, it is best to use only the most essential ones, for instance, Google Analytics and other critical ones.
Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks
When someone links to your blog or page using pingbacks and trackbacks, your blog or page is alerted. Even though it sounds useful, there are also things like Google Webmaster Tools and other tools for checking the link popularity of your website.
Pingbacks and trackbacks can also strain your server resources to an undesirable extent. Every time someone tries to link to your site, WordPress makes a back and forth request. Furthermore, this feature is widely abused during DDoS attacks against websites.
Final Thoughts
Most mobile and web users won’t stay on a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This is what makes website owners concerned about speed and performance. You can simply use the above-mentioned ways for speeding up your WordPress website and retain most of your website visitors. In case you need any assistance in this regard, you can consult a web application development company to address your site’s speed and performance concerns.
Author’s Bio
Fazal Hussain is a digital marketing manager at Appverticals. He has a total of 6 years of experience in the field of digital marketing and has worked in almost all genres of digital marketing be it SEO, PPC, content marketing, email marketing, or social media marketing. In his leisure time, he hangs out with friends, feeds animals, or learns something new.
