WordPress site speed is one of the crucial factors that can make or break your business’s success. If your site loads slower, you will lose everything from email subscribers to page views to sales. Online people are lazy; they have less attention span. If you make them wait to read or buy your products, they will go somewhere else.
Most WordPress users don’t focus on optimizing their site speed. If you don’t optimize your site loading times, you will hate yourself later. Slow websites often irritate your blog visitors, and in the long run, you will definitely lose your loyal readers and fans if your site loads slower.
You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze the speed of your WordPress website. By doing this, you will better understand what is slowing down your site performance. Google PageSpeed Insights will also show you what needs to be fixed to speed up your WordPress site. Here’s a detailed screenshot of how it works.
Top Ways to Speed Up a WordPress Site
Let’s now talk about different fast and best ways to speed up your WordPress site without breaking a sweat.
#Limit the Usage of WordPress Plugins
One of the key reasons your WordPress site loads slower is the usage of too many plugins. Again, if you use heavy loading plugins which take more time to load can dramatically slow down your WordPress loading times. Install only those plugins which are extremely important. Don’t install a plugin just because everyone else uses it. Instead, know your blog priorities first, then use plugins accordingly.
As a rule of thumb, don’t use more than 15 plugins. Using plugins like P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler), you will know how much the plugins are taking time to load on your site. Install this plugin and measure your plugins’ performance by analyzing which WordPress plugins are slowing down your site’s overall performance. This plugin gives you a performance report of your WordPress site.
#Shift to a Better Web Hosting Service
Using cheap or free web hosting providers for your WordPress site can cost you more in general. Look for these two things when picking a WordPress hosting service:
- More Bandwidth: Top hosting services like Media Temple, HostGator, Bluehost, etc., provide unlimited bandwidth to their users. It means you can use how much bandwidth you want and you don’t have to bother about the database sizes, etc.
- Security: Thousands of websites and blogs are getting hacked every single day. Your web hosting too plays a crucial role in the security of your WordPress site. So, don’t compromise on your hosting by using a cheap or free hosting service. Invest some money in the top hosting services. Overall, using a better hosting provider will result in making your site loading time faster.
#Never Forget to Optimize Images
A picture is indeed worth a thousand words. But if you use at least one image per blog post without optimizing, it actually can worsen your site loading time. Always make sure to compress your images. If possible, try to get rid of using GIF files as they tend to take more time to load, making your site loading time even slower. It’s advisable to optimize images for your WordPress site before you upload them.
There are so many free tools out there where you can compress your images’ size without losing the quality. If you find this task tedious, use the plugin called Smush. This will automatically optimize your existing images, and you don’t have to do anything else. Install the plugin, sit back and relax. You can also use a tool like TinyPNG to compress your images to the lowest possible size without compromising the quality.
#Install a Cache Plugin
Once you start using cache plugins like W3 Total Cache (W3TC) or WP Super Cache, your website loads faster. As many of you know, WordPress CMS uses too many resources that are actually not needed. When you don’t compress or clear the cache of unwanted resources, it results in your site loading times. This is why you must use a cache plugin. What it does is clears all the cache and decreases the CPU usage of your WordPress site. That is how your website loads faster when you use a cache plugin and clear your cache regularly.
#Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Usually, your website files are hosted in one place. If your visitors are nearer to that place, your web pages load quickly for them. But for those who are in the other direction might see a lag in loading times. To prevent this problem, you can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN distributes your files and data across the data centers worldwide to ensure your website loads faster at all times in every location. You’ll surely notice faster loading web pages on your site once you start using a CDN.
Final Words:-
So, what are you waiting for? First, analyze your site performance using Google Page Speed Insights, find out all the resources that are slowing down your WordPress site, and use the above tips to speed up your WordPress site. If your site is still slow despite implementing the above practices, hire expert WordPress developers to make your site load in a flash.