WordPress is one of the most popular CMS platform and powers almost 25% of the websites in the world. One big issue with using a CMS platform is that, they are bit slow as compared to custom made CMS or static websites. The reason is obvious, as most of the CMS platforms have plenty of features (which you might not be using in your website) and uses database to store the contents. Wordpress is no exception here, If you don’t use the right tools and techniques in your WordPress Website, You may end up with having a slow and sluggish website.

Note: We are one of the leading WordPress Website Development Company in Delhi, India. We have worked on many WordPress Sites and thus we know how to Speed Up Your WordPress Sites.

In this post, I will cover quick and easy way to Speed Up Your WordPress Site.

Does Website Speed Matters?

Aahh.. You can ask yourself, Do you like to visit a website which is very slow? and you better know the answer as well. Yes you got it right! People don’t like to re-visit a website which is very slow.

Also search engines (Google) considers speed of a site as a ranking factor.

Thus the speed of the website really matters if you want your website visitors having a good user experience on your website and if you want you website to rank well in the search engine result pages. As a SEO Company in Delhi, we know how speed of your website can improve your website ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs).

How to check Website Speed?

There are many online tools available today to check your WordPress or any other website’s speed. And yes these tools are Free. You can also find out what causing your website slowness. Here is the few most popular online tools to check your website speed.

• Google Page Speed Tool
• Pingdom
• GTmetrix

How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site?

As of now you must have checked the speed of your WordPress Site and you might have got the things effecting your website speed. Generally what causes a WordPress website to be slow is, Bad (Shared) Hosting Server, WP Configuration, Slow Theme, Bad Plugins, Media Files and External Scripts.

Let’s get started and fix the speed issue of your WordPress site.

1. Choose A Good Hosting

Website hosting is always a critical and most important factor in the slowness of your website. Always consider a good hosting for your WordPress site. Although you may consider a shared hosting if your website is new and having less number of pages and posts. But once it grows, you should consider switching to a managed WordPress hosting or a dedicated hosting.

Here we recommend WPengine and SiteGround. These are really good when it comes to WordPress Website Hosting (Need WordPress Migration Services? Contact Us). You may also contact us if you need a Fast and Optimized Shared Hosting for your WordPress Website (Starts Rs. 200 or USD 3.99 Per Month). Our hosting servers are optimized for WordPress.

2. Choose A Well Built Theme

WordPress Theme play a very important role in speeding your WordPress Site. Always choose a WordPress Theme which loads fast and do not have unnecessary features included along with in the theme. As you might not be using those additional features in your website.

You may check our WordPress Free & Premium Themes, Which are built for speed having light weight and minimal design. Also if you need more, you may check other Premium Themes here.

3. Minimize The Number Of Plugins

Plugins are required to enhance the functionality of your WordPress Site. But, Remember these plugins also adds extra weight to your website which results in increase in the load time. Try restricting the number of plugins up to 10 or 12 in your WordPress Site. It should not exceed 15 Plugins in a WordPress Site. Anything that can be done without a plugin should be done without it.

Also use a quality plugins, which adds less weight to your page speed. You may use P3 Profiler Plugin to check which plugins are adding more weight and time to your page load. Then you may consider deactivating or replacing that Plugin.

4. Use CDN – Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers. CDN serves content to end-users with high availability and high performance. CDNs serve a large fraction of the Internet content today, Which Includes Text, Graphics and Scripts etc. Most of the popular and big blogging sites are already using CDN.

Here we recommend MaxCDN, Which we think is the best to deliver the static contents of your site and increasing the speed of your website. You can also use CloudFlare CDN, which has got a FREE version also. It also adds security to your WordPress Website.

5. Use An Effective Caching Plugin

Caching the content of the website really boosts the speed of the website. It caches the dynamic content into static pages thus pages loads faster. Also it helps in minifying the the web objects like HTML, CSS and JavaScripts, Which also increase the speed of a WordPress Websites.

Here we recommend W3 Total Cache, Which is one of the most popular plugin in WP Plugin directory. It has got all the features you need and thus you won’t require to install any other plugin for this purpose. Also it’s completely FREE.

6. Optimize Images

Multimedia contents likes images adds a substantial amount of weight to your web page. Optimizing the images of your website will considerably save the bandwidth of the users and increase your website speed. There are many WordPress Plugin to optimize the images of your WordPress Site without loosing the quality of the images as such.

Here we recommend ShortPixel Image Optimizer, which is really good, It reduces the size of the images without effecting the much on the quality of the images.

7. Use Lazy Load To Images

Lazy Load is a technique where only the images above the fold downloads initially, which speeds up your web page. Latter when the user scrolls down, other images downloads when comes in the view. This not only increases the speed of your website but also saves the bandwidth of the users who do not scroll down. We have got some good plugins to do this.

Here we use and recommend BJ Lazy Load, Which does the job efficiently and speed up your WordPress site by loading the images once it comes in view.

8. Do Not Host The Videos To WordPress

We don’t recommend hosting the video contents directly to your WordPress Website. Instead you can use YouTube or any other Video Hosting Platforms to host your videos and then give a link in your website. It’s simple and improves a lot in Speed Up Your WordPress Site.

9. CSS In The Header & JavaScripts In The Footer

Always push the JavaScripts to the footer of the website, as JavaScripts adds functionality to your website once it’s loaded properly. Also Async and Defer the external Scripts as needed so that your website loads faster. We recommend linking CSS in the header only otherwise it will effect the design of the site once it loads.

For this we recommend Speed Booster Pack Plugin, Which does the job efficiently.

10. Disable Hotlinking & Leeching

Hotlinking is a kind of bandwidth “theft.” It occurs when other sites direct link to the images on your site from their articles which add loads to your server. Here is how you can restrict others liking directly to your web images. Just copy the script below and paste in your .htaccess file (Don’t forget to change our website name to yours).

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?digitaladquest.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalAdQuest [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

11. Control The Number Of Revisions Stored

Post revisions unnecessarily takes up space in your WordPress database. Some people believe that revisions can also affect some database queries run by plugins. If a plugin doesn’t specifically exclude post revisions, it might slow down your site by searching through them unnecessarily. You can easily limit the number of revisions WordPress keeps for each article. Simply add this line of code to your wp-config.php file.

define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4 );

This code will limit WordPress to only save your last 4 revisions of each post or page, and discard older revisions automatically.

12. Optimize WordPress Database

After using WordPress for a while, your database will have lots of unneeded information stored, which you probably don’t need any more. For improved performance, you can optimize your database to get rid of all that unnecessary information.

You can use these Plugins WP-Optimize or WP-Sweep plugin to optimize the database of your WordPress Website.

This is it in this post, I hope these techniques and plugins will help you improve the speed of your WordPress Website. You may not be needed to use all the techniques discussed above, only few of these if implemented properly can boost your website speed. Use these techniques as per the speed testing tools reports and Speed up your WordPress Site.

Thanks for reading! Please share this article if you enjoyed reading it

The post How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site appeared first on Digital Ad Quest.