WordPress is a popular free platform that allows creating websites, blogs, online stores and so on. Site promotion is a very important aspect in a clients’ attraction (especially in eCommerce) and one of the key factors that can raise site’s rank is a high load speed and good general performance. Long waiting makes customers leave before the page is loaded, so if you want to succeed in your project you have to think about the performance improvement.
Before we will figure out how to speed up a WordPress site, let’s analyze the main reasons which can slow down the loading speed:
- Incorrect configuration of web hosting server;
- Mistakes in WordPress configuration (for example cached pages are not served);
- Images are not compressed;
- External scripts or inappropriate plugins using.
To choose the most rational and reliable ways of site performance optimization, it is recommended to measure the pages load time with special benchmarks. After that, you can start dealing with speed improvement solutions. But what are the most efficient methods? Here are 7 useful tips:
1. Choose the reliable and tested WordPress hosting
One of the key moments of good performance on the WordPress website is a right hosting service selection. There are a lot of shared hosting providers, who offer the best conditions for your site, but you never know what kind of optimization you get. Besides, the common problem of shared hosting environment is a low loading speed during the peak traffic hours, because the common server space is used by multiple websites. As an option, you can use cloud servers, which are faster and better optimized, but even if you are dealing with shared ones, it would be reasonable to analyze all variants and choose the time-tested hosting.
2. Optimize your images
The page loading speed can be increased via images compression because they have a great impact on webpage size. There are few ways you can optimize images without losing their quality. First of all, you can do it by using Photoshop, Chrome PageSpeed Insights or similar online services, but it can take some time. Fortunately, there is a list of special plugins, which make this process faster and easier, for example, Smush Image Compression and Optimization, EWWW Image Optimizer and others.
3. Select the lightweight WordPress theme/framework
A good way to speed up a WordPress site is to use lightweight themes, which are not overloaded with many sliders, widgets, icons and other interactive elements. The most rational option is to use WordPress default themes, or look for a better looking and well-optimized ones on other resources.
4. Use caching plugins
Caching is another important aspect of WordPress site boost because it helps to minimize the speed of downloading process on the server. It allows storing your pages and notes in the form of static files, which are getting delivered to the customers. For better result, you can combine advanced caching mechanisms with special caching plugins.
5. Put a CDN into practice
People will be visiting your site from many parts of the world and the loading speed will differ depending on their location. CDN (Content Delivery Networks) serves to level the difference in distance by making a copy of the website and keeping it in data centers in different places. If it’s necessary, CDN will show the webpage to a visitor from the nearest location.
6. Take care of WordPress database
Optimization of WordPress database consists in a timely cleaning, which will help to reduce backups’ size and keep database tables in a good condition. It will also help to get rid of spam, unwanted themes and plugins, drafts of content and so on. The disregard of this process eventually can cause the slowdown of site’s functioning speed, so it is recommended to make such operations periodically for better performance.
7. Choose plugins wisely
The number of installed plugins affects the website performance, so you need to decide which ones are the most important for you. A large number of plugins causes the emergence of a big amount of backups and consumes a lot of resources. As a result, the performance falls as well as loading speed, so keep only the necessary plugins and provide a fast service for your visitors.
ConclusionWordPress website – is a great opportunity to realize your ideas and make people get interested in your project, so one of the main tasks is to provide high-quality services and good loading speed. Following the given instructions, you can easily improve and optimize the performance of your website. This will help you to attract a versatile audience, to get a positive feedback and lay the foundation of further success
It goes without saying that if you are interested in any kind of customization, feel free to contact our support team or ask your questions if there are any on our website.
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