Why a Website needs to load fast
Whenever a person visits your website, you have only a while to seek your visitor’s attention and make him stay on your website. In a report by the Microsoft, Bing search team said that a 2-second longer delay in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by 3.8%, increased lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and a reduced clicks by 4.3%.
If your site takes a long time load, you will not be able to seek the attention of your visit at all. Nowadays, Google now included site speed in its ranking algorithm. That means if your site is slow, you will lose visitors which may prove very harmful to you and your business or company.
So let’s pay some attention to increase your WordPress website speed. On this blog, we will discuss 15 points on How to Speed Up your WordPress Website!
1. Choosing a good host and a good hosting provider
The main factor that increases the speed of your website is the hosting of your WordPress website. It will be a better idea to host your new website on a shared hosting provider that offers unlimited bandwidth, space, emails, domains, and more.
Usually, we don’t think much about the offer that shared hosting environments fail to deliver good loading times during peak traffic hours, and most fail to provide 99 percent uptime in any given month. Most of the time shared hosting delivers poor performance because you are sharing the same server space with countless other websites, and there is no telling how much resources others are using. Moreover, you even don’t know how well the servers are optimized.
So if you want a responsive, speedy, user-friendly WordPress website, you have to choose a good hosting and a good hosting provider.
2. Using a Great Caching Plugin
If you’ve got static images, CSS, and JavaScript on your website that rarely change, browser side caching can help make your site snappier. It involves storing parts of your site so they only need to be loaded once instead of every time a user visits your site. It is very helpful for your return visitors, as well as others who visit several pages of your site.
You can use some plugins for caching like W3 Total Cache. Plugin promises a 10 times improvement in overall site performance when properly configured.
3. Splitting Excessive Comments into Pages
If your content is getting a lot of comments, this could be the reason for getting slow of your WordPress website. If you want to make your website fast, responsive, and user friendly, you have to break the comments section into pages in order to shave off the time it takes for them to load.
To do this step you simply just have to go to the settings » Discussions and then you have to choose the number of comments you want per page. This will help to boost page load times for posts and pages with a lot of comments
4. Starting with a strong Framework/theme:
You will be glad to know that the Twenty Fifteen “framework” (the default WP theme) is very lightweight and speedy. This is because they keep the guts simple; compare that to bloated frameworks which have lots of features that you will never use, slowing your site to a crawl.
Till now one of the fastest loading premium frameworks is the Thesis Theme Framework. It surpasses the basic WordPress themes by being far easier to customize. It is a very strong framework that won’t let you to slow you down with excess plugins or custom edits
5. Compress Images:
On a WordPress site, usually, the largest files are the image files. If they aren’t compressed they can take a long time to load. If you want to compress those images you can use some tools like Tiny PNG which allows also strips unused colors for lossy.
If you use a lot of images on your site, you might want to implement lazy loading. The Lazy Load plugin allows you to only load images above the fold when a new visitor visits your site. Images load when a user starts scrolling down the page. This trick not only speeds up the page but also saves bandwidth for users who don’t scroll all the way to the bottom of your pages.
6. Configure a CDN
Your content should be delivered blazing fast wherever the user’s location is. Sometimes it’s not possible, though that is if your site isn’t on an infrastructure that contains data centers in other parts of the world. The distance can mean a lag in content delivery, which is where a content delivery network (CDN) becomes convenient.
A CDN makes a page faster load times because whenever it is configured your website will use an optimized server that’s closest to your visitors. The data center will store static content and files, and then deliver them to users based on their location. This can help to reduce external HTTP requests because the static content is already ready to go instead of requesting lots of HTTP at once. CDN depends on the popularity of your site.
7. Minify CSS, HTML, JavaScript
Remove all the white spaces from codes where possible! You’re done 😀
When spaces and tabs make the code more readable for humans, servers and browsers couldn’t care less as long as it’s valid and performs without error. Moreover, you can manually circulate your code with a fine-tooth comb and various plugins.
8. Optimize your homepage to load quickly
You can do many things to ensure that your homepage loads quickly. Things you can do include:
- Reduce the number of posts on the page
- Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page
- Show excerpts instead of full posts
- Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need
Overall, a clean and focused homepage design will help your website to load fast.
9. Cutting Down on HTTP Requests
Whenever someone visits a page of your WordPress site, the corresponding files must be sent to that person’s browser, including images, CSS files, and JavaScript library references. So if you have an HTML file, two CSS files, five JavaScript files, and eight images, that’s a total of 16 files that need to be loaded. You can reduce the number of objects on your site’s pages, you can minimize the number of HTTP requests that are required to render a page, speeding up load times.
10. Remove Unused Media/Plugins/Themes
Unless you follow the minimalist lifestyle, over time, we all tend to bulk mess. These unnecessary things should be cleaned out every now and then. The same goes for your website.
Firstly you have to remove the unused plugins and themes. They not only show security vulnerabilities but also they can also detract from WordPress site performance. Just find out which plugins and themes are absolutely necessary. Keep them! Remove others!
Then you have to remove the unused media files. You can do this either using some plugins like Media Cleaner and so on or you can do this manually. To do this step manually simply go to Media » Library and click the unattached option. You’ll then see all of the media files that aren’t being used on your site. You can delete those files to free up space. You’re done!
11. Optimize your WordPress database
Very simple trick! You can do this using many plugins. Here I’m giving some plugins names and link that will optimize your WordPress database!
The plugins let a simple work that is optimizing our database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce their overhead.
12. Upgrade to PHP7
Switching from PHP5 to PHP7 can make a tremendous impact on site speed. PHP 7 can handle uncached hits two to three times faster than on PHP 5.5 and can result in 30-50 percent improvements in memory consumption.
The most important thing before switching, it’s not backward compatible. That means once you upgrade, you cannot back to the previous one. If you want to detect if your theme or any plugins might present any incompatibility issues, just run a test on your site with PHP Compatibility Checker.
13. Enable the GZIP Compression
Whenever a visitor hits on your website, a call is made to your server to deliver the requested files. The larger the file, the longer it takes for the full page to load. Gzip works to compress your web pages and style sheets before they’re sent over to the end-user. You can enable Gzip compression through sensitive .htaccess server files.
14. Keep the external scripts to a minimum
The usage of external scripts on your web pages adds a huge shred of data to your total loading time. It will be better for you to use a low number of scripts, including the only essentials like tracking tools or the commenting systems.
15. Disable pingbacks and trackbacks
To alert you whenever your blog or page receives a link, there are two components which are pingbacks and trackbacks. It might sound useful, but you also have things like Google Webmaster Tools and other services to check links to your website.
Keeping the pingbacks and trackbacks on can also put an undesirable amount of clasp on your server resources. This is because when anyone tries to link up your website, it raises requests from WordPress back and forth. You can make this disabled manually. Just go to WP-Admin -> Settings -> Discussion. Deselect “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks).” This trick may help you to speed up your WordPress website.
The biggest advantage of making your website fast will help you to improve your visitor’s visiting experience. We have tried to give you the best ideas about how can you make your website faster! Thanks for reading this blog. If you liked our blog please do share it with your dearest ones! Peace! 🙂
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