How to Speeding Up WordPress Site?
A
Guide to Speeding up WordPress:
When
a person lands on your site for the first time, you only have a few seconds to
capture their attention to convince them to hang around.
Get
ready to lose sleep at night: according to a report by the Microsoft Bing
search team, a 2-second longer delay in page responsiveness reduced user
satisfaction by 3.8%, increased lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and reduced
clicks by 4.3%.
If
your site takes too long to load, most people are gone, lost before you even
had a chance.
Not
only that, but Google now includes site speed in its ranking algorithm. That
means that your site’s speed effects SEO, so if your site is slow, you’re now
losing visitors from impatience and reduced rankings in search engines. Yikes.
1. Choose a better web hosting
provider
The
major factor that influences the speed of a website is the hosting of your WordPress
website. It might seem like a good idea to host your new website on a
shared hosting provider that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, space, emails,
domains and more. However, the point that we usually miss out on regarding this
offer is that shared hosting environments fail to deliver good loading times on
peak traffic hours, and most fail to provide 99 percent uptime in any given
month.
Shared
hosting tends to deliver a poorer performance because you are sharing the same
server space with countless other websites, and there is no telling how much
resources others are using. Plus, you don’t know exactly how well the servers
are optimized.
Thankfully,
the web-hosting industry has advanced with technology, and the prices of cloud
hosting providers have decreased with the passage of time. In the present
times, you can buy dedicated cloud servers from SiteGround, DigitalOcean,
Amazon Web Services, and even Google Compute Engine at a nominal price.
However, setting those servers up can be a daunting task as you are required to
set servers up from scratch. There are web hosting providers like Cloudways
(where I work) who make the task of setting up optimized cloud servers as easy
as click and launch. You can read more about the process here: how to set up
WordPress through Cloudways.
2. Use a lightweight WordPress
theme/framework
WordPress
themes (WordPress
Theme Development) with a lot of dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, social icons,
and many
elements and higher page sizes, then they will definitely cause your web server to take a thumping.
elements and higher page sizes, then they will definitely cause your web server to take a thumping.
The
best option here is to use lightweight themes. One solution is to go for one of
the default WordPress themes. Another is to try out something like Neve, built
by the same guys behind CodeinWP.
Alternatively,
for a feature-rich website, you can also opt for a theme that uses a good
framework like Bootstrap or Foundation.
3. Reduce image sizes
Images
are the major contributors to the size increment of a given webpage. The trick
is to reduce the size of the images without compromising on the quality.
If
you manually optimize the images using Chrome PageSpeed Insights extension or
Photoshop or any other tools, the process will take a long time. Fortunately,
there are plugins available for just about everything you can think of,
including image optimization. The ones worth mentioning are:
- Optimal
- WP Smush
- EWWW Image
Optimizer
Using
any of the above-mentioned plugins on your WordPress site will drastically
reduce image sizes, thus improving the speed of your website.
4.
Minify JS and CSS files
If
you run your website through the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, you will
probably be notified about minimizing the size of your CSS and JS files. What
this means is that by reducing the number of CSS and JS calls and the size of
those files, you can improve the site loading speed.
Also,
if you know your way around WordPress themes, you can study the guides provided
by Google and do some manual fixing. If not, then there are plugins that will
help you achieve this goal; the most popular being the Autoptimize that can
help in optimizing CSS, JS and even HTML of your WordPress website.
5.
Use advanced caching mechanisms with a caching plugin
WordPress
caching plugins (e.g. W3 Total Cache) has been there for a long time, making
the complex tasks of adding caching rules to your website elements easier.
Combining such plug-ins with advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish could
help you better the loading speed of your website and ultimately speed up
WordPress considerably.
6.
Use a CDN
The
people who visit your website belong to various locations in the world, and
needless to say, the site-loading speed will differ if the visitors are located
far away from where your site is hosted. There are many CDN (Content Delivery
Networks) that help in keeping the site-loading speed to a minimum for visitors
from various countries. A CDN keeps a copy of your website in various data
centers located in different places. The primary function of a CDN is to serve
the webpage to a visitor from the nearest possible location. Cloudflare and
MaxCDN are among the most popular CDN services.
7.
Cleanup WordPress database
Deleting
unwanted data from your database will keep its size to a minimum and also helps
in reducing the size of your backups. It is also necessary to delete spam
comments, fake users, old drafts of your content and maybe even unwanted
plugins as well as themes. All of this will reduce the size of your databases
and web files, and thus speed up WordPress – your WordPress. (Fix
error establishing database connection)
8.
Deactivate or uninstall plugins
Keeping
unwanted plugins on your WordPress websites will add a tremendous amount of
junk to your web files. Moreover, it will also increase the size of your backup
and put an overwhelming amount of load on your server resources while backup
files are being generated. It is better to get rid of the plugins that you
don’t use and also look for alternate methods to use third-party services for
automating or scheduling tasks (like sharing of your latest posts to social
media).
IFTTT
or Zapier are two web services that help in automating such tasks and reduce
the burden on your website and server resources.
9.
Keep external scripts to a minimum
The
usage of external scripts on your web pages adds a big chunk of data to your
total loading time. Thus, it is best to use a low number of scripts, including
only the essentials such as tracking tools (like Google Analytics) or
commenting systems (like Disqus).
10.
Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
Pingbacks
and trackbacks are two core WordPress components that alert you whenever your
blog or page receives a link. It might sound useful, but you also have things
such as Google Webmaster Tools and other services to check the links of your
website.
Keeping
pingbacks and trackbacks on can also put an undesirable amount of strain on
your server resources. This is so because whenever anyone tries to link up to
your site, it generates requests from WordPress back and forth. This
functionality is also widely abused when targeting a website with DDoS attacks.
You
can turn it all off in WP-Admin → Settings → Discussion. Just deselect “Allow
link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks).” This will help
you speed up WordPress some more.
Conclusion
The
biggest advantage of lowering your website’s loading time is that it will help
tremendously in improving the experience of your visitors. The case remains the
same whether they are using mobile devices or PCs. Furthermore, it will also
improve your rankings in the SERPs. After all, reduced bandwidth usage of your
hosting and faster site-loading speed on the client-side will only benefit you
both in the short as well as in the long run.
Thanks for sharing this informative article on WordPress development and how to speedup your WordPress site. If you have any requirement to Hire WordPress Developers for your project on remote. Please visit us
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