Page speed happens to be an important factor in determining the overall user experience of a website.

The faster the website loading speed, the better the impression it is likely to make on the visitor. This is the reason why Google uses Page Speed as an important factor when determining the ranking of a web page.

Page speed optimization is an integral part of any website optimization or search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

If you’re looking for ways to speed up your Wordpress website, you are at the right place. There are a number of ways in which you can improve the speed of your website, of which the best ones are mentioned here.

But before getting started, let’s first get acquainted with the basics.

How to know whether my website speed is up to the mark?

If you’re wondering the same thing, there are a number of tools that can help you.

The speed of your overall website may differ from the speed of individual pages, because the page speed depends on a number of factors, including the size of the page, media content on the page, cache, page type (static or dynamic), number of visitors, among other things.

So, you may need to test the speed of individual pages as well as the homepage. Here are some Page Speed Analysis/Testing tools you can use:

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Tools.Pingdom.com

These tools will tell you exactly where your website or page stands in terms of speed.

If you’re wondering why you should speed up your website or landing page in the first place, here are some ways in which a faster website can help your cause.

• Since Google & other search engines love websites that are fast, optimizing your page speed can help you achieve better search ranking results.
  
• Websites that load faster reportedly make a better user impression than the ones taking over 2 seconds to load.

Basically, if you care to rank well in search engines or get convertible leads to your website, you need to seriously consider speeding up your WordPress site.

Now, let’s come back to the point. Here are some proven ways/tips to Improve Your WordPress Website Speed.

1. Change your hosting provider

With one that is faster and more reliable. In most cases, the reason why a website doesn’t load fast enough or faces issues like server crash is because of the unreliable hosting.

Web hosting is how your website remains alive on the internet. Make sure to purchase a good one with a provider that is known for reliability.

Some factors to consider when selecting a hosting provider include bandwidth, uptime, technical support, reputation & customer review.

Do not go for a cheap hosting just because it offers a lot of things, such as unlimited space and bandwidth, free emails, etc. at a relatively lower price. They may not be good enough for the purpose.

If you care about delivering high loading speed at all times, especially during peak traffic hours, DO NOT choose shared hosting, as it generally fails to deliver the 99 percent uptime promise when you need it the most.

If you are in search of a dedicated web server for your business website, cloud servers are also a good and fast option.

Also Read: 102 Significant WordPress Statistics & Facts (2020 Update)

2. Use a fast loading theme

Even if you are not willing to pay for a WordPress theme, make sure that the free theme you are using is light in weight and fast in loading.

Don’t worry, as there are hundreds of amazing, free WordPress themes that load fast, irrespective of the device or platform.

So, what makes a website theme load slow.

Well, to start with, themes that are filled with a lot of dynamic content, media, sliders, heavy images, social icons, flash, Javascript, etc. tend to get heavier or larger in sizes, which reduces the page loading speed.

And if you can afford, go for a paid, optimized and lightweight WordPress theme.

3. Deactivate the plugins you don’t need

WordPress has a tendency to send you recommendations to install new plugins to make your website better. But that doesn’t mean you should install every plugin you hear about. Some of them can actually make your site heavier and load slower.

Plugins, when not needed, will simply add to the weight of your site by creating junk files and also increasing your backup size, which ultimately leads to increasing the load on your web server.

So, just get rid of the plugins that you don’t need, and use lighter alternatives of the ones you do need.

4. Use correct image size

Images, like any other media, play a significant role in the page speed by adding to the weight of your website. Make sure to use good images in the right size.

Now, the correct size doesn’t always mean you have to use low size images. In fact, most of the high-definition images are high in size. It’s okay to use them as long as they go seamlessly with your website theme and doesn’t slow down the website.

Some of the WordPress themes are made to work only with low-size images, so even if you use high image size, it will still show the low-size version, which means you will be wasting your server resources for nothing.

5. Use a caching plugin

A caching plugin saves the cached version of your website in HTML form on your web server in order to serve the site visitors with the lighter (HTML) version of the site.

This saves the time needed to process the entire WordPress website or page every time a new user requests for it, making the website/page load faster.

WordPress has many caching plugins, of which the W3 Total Cache plugin is the most widely used for adding a caching mechanism to WordPress sites.

Also Read: 5 Best WordPress SEO Plugins & Tools for SEO To get Better Ranking [2020]

For added performance, you can consider using advanced caching techniques like Varnish for further optimizing your website loading speed.

6. Use optimized images

Images and photos play a big role in reducing or improving your site speed, which is why you must ensure using optimizes images on your business website.

Optimizing an image usually means reducing its size without affecting the quality. It is not an easy task, but possible with the use of proper tools.

Trying to reduce the size of your website images with Photoshop and other similar tools may be time-consuming.

The best way to do this is by using a good WordPress image optimization plugin.

Some popular options include EWWW Optimizer and ShortPixel Optimizer.

The plugin will automatically reduce the size of every image you upload to the website, thereby reducing the server load and improving the speed.

Replace images like PNG icons with CSS alternatives to further reduce the load.

7. Optimize your ads

If you are using advertisements on your WordPress website, make sure that these are optimised to have the minimal script and the maximum exposure.

Optimizing your website ads will also ensure that you generate the maximum revenue from them.

If you’re not sure how to do that, you can consider using an ad optimizer plugin.

On the other hand, if your website has to use too many ads, just go with dedicated hosting and make sure it comes from a reliable service provider.

8. Optimize the script

Scripts like JavaScript are some of the slowest loading elements on a website. Make sure that these are optimized for good.

First, use only the script that you absolutely need on the website and remove (or put in the comments) the ones that you don’t need presently. Plugins are also rich in scripts, so remove the unnecessary ones.

Put the only important script in the header section and place the rest in the footer. Make sure that the javascript is loaded only at the end of HTML files, as it takes more time to load.

Make sure to read this one if you get any WordPress errors: Common WordPress Errors & their Best Solutions to Fix it

9. Optimize the website CSS

CSS is Cascading Style Sheet, which is used for adding and optimizing the design part of an HTML or other markup language website.

Optimizing your website CSS is a nice way to ensure that the web design loads faster than before. Some ways to do this include:

• Using image sprites to package your images
• Minifying or compressing the CSS
• Reducing unnecessary code
• Using external CSS instead of inline or on-page CSS
• Put CSS at the top of JavaScript
• Reducing whitespace

10. Cleanup WordPress database regularly (Final Point To Speed up Your WordPress Website)

All data on your WordPress website is stored in a database on the server. By regularly deleting or optimizing your website data, you will ensure that the database is clean and lightweight, which will help improve the loading speed of the site.

Some of the data types that you can delete include spam comments, old images (that are no longer in use), old plugins, fake user profiles, old content drafts, among other things.

It is wise to regularly check your website for such unwanted data and delete or optimize them.

Conclusion

The WordPress speed optimization tips mentioned here will certainly help improve the speed as well as the performance of your WordPress website.

These tips are friendly to all types of users and can be easily implemented by just anyone.

However, a WordPress developer or coder can do much more than just optimizing the images or plugins on your website.

He can optimize your website code, JavaScripts, CSS, DNS lookups, HTTP, Ajax, bootstrap and other technical elements to further improve the speed.

Choose a Reliable Partner Who understands How to Develop Custom WordPress Website Right from the Word Go!

To know-how or to hire a WordPress developer from SAGIPL for website optimization, contact us or visit.

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