Today we will discuss Website Speed & Performance. According to Google Webmasters, the acceptable threshold for a website’s loading time is only 2 seconds. Because no one has time to wait for your website to load while others load in seconds.
Now the common question is how long does your website take to load? Are you a lagging website owner waiting for your business to lose money? And of course! How to improve WordPress website speed?
Don’t worry! You have found the right blog that will provide solutions to all the reasons that slow down your WordPress website. Keep reading this blog to know how to test website speed and how to increase WordPress website speed.
Why do you need to Speed up WordPress Websites?
.Well, speed is one of the main areas a website owner should be concerned about. The reason? There are several factors that you should consider when it comes to speeding up your WordPress website. Here are some of them:
Get Better SERP Rank
Search engines are the best medium to get traffic to your website. And if you want to grab those spots on the SERP first page, you must speed up your website. Because Google and other popular search engines consider speed as an important factor while ranking web pages.
Reduce Bounce Rate
Getting traffic to your website is worthless if they don’t stay on your site long enough and get your product/service. And a slow site will undoubtedly cause customers to leave your website.
Improved user Experience
A good user experience is critical to keeping your audience engaged and increasing conversion rates. Having a website with a good loading speed can lead to a well-improved user experience.
Now you can have some idea about how important it is to speed up your website. Let’s move on to the next section to know how you can test your website speed and whether you need to increase the loading speed of your website or not.
How to test your website speed?
Now the question is your website loading speed good enough you understand? Well, you have a lot available which you can use for faster website speed. If you are looking for a free tool, my suggestion would be Google PageSpeed Insight Using this tool, you can test your website speed separately for desktop and mobile.
This tool is really easy to use. Just enter your webpage URL and press analyze. Then choose the device for which you want to test the speed.
Here you will get a performance result out of 100. Ideally, you should aim for 90 out of 100 for website performance. Another great thing about this free tool is that it provides you with various opportunities to optimize your website to improve your site speed. So, use the advice provided by this tool to speed up WordPress.
Tips on how to boost up WordPress speed and performance
Frustrated with your website speed test results? Don’t worry, you can always perform speed optimization to score your desired performance results. But how to increase the speed of the WordPress site? Here are a few ways you can speed up your WordPress website:
Choose a fast server:
By fast server, I preferably mean a dedicated server. To begin with, it is very common for people to go for shared hosting because it comes cheap. However, once you become popular and get a good amount of traffic to your website, it is always a good idea to go for dedicated hosting.
Since shared hosting and all the resources are being shared between multiple websites, it has an inevitable negative impact on the performance of your website. Especially most shared web hosting fails to provide 99 percent uptime and website loading speed during peak hours is not satisfactory.
So I suggest that if you can afford it, you should switch to a dedicated server for WordPress hosting which gets a good amount of traffic on a monthly basis.
Also, make sure to choose a server that is located near the location from where you get the most number of website visitors. Because of various factors like network latency, TTFB (Time to First Byte), etc., your server location also plays an important role in your website speed.
Use a caching plugin
Caching plugin makes a website faster by skipping many steps while loading a webpage. It creates a copy of the page the first time it is created and then uses that copy to serve each subsequent user who visits your WordPress site.
Since WordPress CMS is dynamic, if you don’t use a caching plugin, every time someone tries to access your website, it will repeat the entire process and fetch all the data from your WordPress database, which will put a huge load on your server. And so make the site super slow.
So, use a caching plugin on your website to speed up WordPress. You can also combine advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish with caching plugins to see a significant improvement in your website loading speed.
Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript
You need HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build and run your WordPress site, which can slow your website down a bit if not optimized. And for this reason, experts always recommend minifying your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript codes.
Minifying code doesn’t affect how your website works, it just removes unused code and replaces variable and function names with a shorter names. As a result, it reduces load time and bandwidth usage on your websites So, if your website doesn’t currently use minified code, minify the code quickly to improve WordPress speed.
Remove Render Blocking Javascript and CSS
Remove render-blocking JavaScript and CSS as these scripts suggest blocking your webpage from loading before it loads. This is one area of improvement that Google Pagespeed Insights often recommends.
Most JavaScript is used to add animations or popups to a website that aren’t really needed until the site is fully loaded. This can result in sluggish loading for your website. You can remove these render-blocking codes for later loading so that they don’t affect the actual loading speed of your website. This is an effective way to improve WordPress site speed.
Choose a lightweight and fast themes
A website is a visual form of marketing your products and services and it’s natural to be tempted to go for a plugin that has lots of animations and functionality. However, if too many animations and extra functions slow down your site, it’s really of no use.
I’m not saying go for a smooth website, but make sure loading speed is on your checklist when you choose your WordPress theme. You need to find the right balance between what functionality and animations you want on your website and the loading speed.
Optimize your WordPress website images, media, and database
Over time your website becomes a storehouse of unused images and media which can increase the size of your website and thus affect the loading speed of the site. The same goes for databases. If not optimized, the database stores unnecessary data which slow down the WordPress site.
So, check if your website is full of unnecessary images and media files. And if so, clean them up. Also, it’s always a good idea to optimize your images before uploading. A reduced media size like an optimized image and database size will also slow down your website.
Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Although it is a good idea to get a server close to your frequent visitor’s location. It’s not enough for all the people who come to your site. And CDN solves that problem for you.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) keeps a copy of the website in different data centers located in different parts of the world. This way you can be sure that your website will load at a certain speed regardless of the location from which someone tries to access your site.
Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
Pingbacks and Trackbacks are great for finding out when your blog or web pages get a link. Although these are great, you should know that these links can put an unwanted strain on your server. Also, if you turn on these two features, you are always at risk of DDoS attacks. So, make sure to disable pingbacks and trackbacks for WordPress speed optimization and to protect your site from DDoS attacks. You can easily disable them from the WordPress admin dashboard.
Uninstall unused plugins and themes
If you’re not currently using plugins or themes, it’s unnecessary to keep those files on your server. The larger the size of your website, the slower it is likely to load. So, uninstall any WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that you don’t use.
In addition to uninstalling, you should also check if updates are available for your themes and plugins If so, make sure you update them.
Use the latest version of PHP
One thing you can’t leave off your checklist of how to improve website speed is the PHP version of your website. It is recommended to use the latest version of PHP to maintain the speed of your website. However, don’t just start using the latest version of PHP because your WordPress, themes, and other plugins need to be compatible with the version of Php you are using on your site. So, first, check if the theme and plugins are compatible with the latest version of PHP and then upgrade to that.
Reduce the number of post revisions
I know, you probably didn’t think you’d find this option in the “How to Speed Up WordPress Site Tips” list. Several post revisions can affect your website speed. Every time you save a draft, WordPress saves it indefinitely. These additional versions stored on your website can slow down your site.
But you only need one version, the latest and most optimized version. That’s why you need to reduce the number of post revisions on your website. You can set a minimum revision number using a plugin or “define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4);” Can be added manually. in your wp-config.php file.
Conclusion
Now you know how to improve WordPress site speed to fix your laggy website and make it super fast. Try these to increase WordPress speed. Some of the tips I shared for speeding up WordPress may include things you already use. If this is the case, you’re already on your way but try the other tips mentioned that you’re not practicing on your site. If you follow the steps, you will likely see great results in your website loading speed and WordPress performance.
A well-loading site means a great user experience and a great user experience can help generate higher revenue. Therefore, never underestimate the importance of your website speed.
