If your e-commerce website makes the customer wait for more than 3 seconds, don’t expect any sale; says a study. Things are very similar for the business and blogging websites, where website speed significantly affects conversion rate. If your site does not have a quicker approach to load and performs against the other available sites then it will automatically not deliver results you want. Therefore, you must always look for the ways by which you can improve your website’s speed.
18 best tips to optimize WordPress website’s speed are mentioned here:
1. Taking Pingdom Test
One of the effective ways that you can try is doing the Pingdom Website Speed Test for your website. This test will help you in knowing the speed of your website along with finding the reasons that are responsible for the slow speed. This is the ultimate speed test that you can take for your WordPress site.
All you have to do is to enter the URL of your site and then selecting the location before clicking on the ‘start test’ option.
With this test, you can get the complete insights of your website with all the facility to access all the amazing features that it offers to your website.
This performance metrics, in turn, will improve the speed of your website.
From content to site structure, Pingdom will analysis everything from you.
2. Select a good host
One of the major reasons for the slow speed of the sites is due to the insufficient and incapable host provider. Thus to better up the speed of the WordPress website, it is important to hunt for the best host. Considering the shared hosting option may seem good in the beginning but with time it will eventually cost you way too much. The shared host will make the speed of your website really slow or may keep the site down most of the time. It, therefore, becomes a must to have a high-speed host for your WordPress. You may ask the other bloggers which host are they using or you can search the market with the good reputed names by yourself to get the best host that can make things easy, simple yet effectively fast for your WordPress website.
3. Minimizing the widgets
Having some amount of ads, widgets and badges are oaky for any blog. No doubt they add a little personality to the blog. Some of the users find the extra ads, widgets, etc. on the blog useful as they can get some beneficial information for them. But most of the users get really annoyed if there are too much of widgets, badges, and ads on your WordPress website.
The users when encounters too many ads feel that they are being used for no reason. Also, your users are not interested in knowing from where the other visitors are coming on your site. Therefore you must try and keep these ads and widgets on a very minimal note.
4. Choose a relevant theme
Having the right framework, theme or template for the website – This may not get your attention in the beginning but sooner you will realize that the template you choose for your website is one of the contributing factors that affect the loading and response time of the website. Don’t go for too much of everything; rather be specific and limited in reaching to your customers with your vision.
If you have chosen the template or theme that has a lot of extra factors that are of no use those factors will take a significant amount of time to load and hence will reduce the performing time of your site by reducing its speed. Thus don’t go for glitters but choose the real gold for your website.
5. Image optimization
All the marketers that work hard for attracting the customers know how important the role of an image is in attracting and retaining the customers. An image with clear and smooth pixels will speak and convey your message way louder than using many words. Thus you must be very specific in choosing the images that you will be uploading on your websites.
Choosing only the relevant images will also help in reducing the loading time of those images. Unnecessary uploading any type of images on your site will enhance the overall loading time of the site by combining the loading time of all those images. Therefore you must use a minimum number of images that can be uploaded within a specified time limit.
6. Remove excess buttons for sharing
It is quite obvious that we all want our website to reach to as many people as possible and to achieve this we are always ready to experiment with a number of options, ways, and methods. In order to improve the visibility of our site, we often tend to do too much on the site. One such thing is using too many share buttons on the website hoping to reach a huge amount of people.
Using too many sharing options on the website destroy the speed of the site like anything. With too many linking to the various other platforms, you cut down the loading and performing time of the website. Rather you can try and use only the sharing buttons of those sites from where you expect a huge amount of traffic and leads. After doing this, you can remove all the other buttons and can focus on optimizing the use of the available buttons on your website.
7. Content management
Website is not a place where you can put each and everything about your business or work. It is a place that gives an idea to your audience about the type of work that you are doing along with the manner in which you target it. Therefore, the role of content management comes into the picture. Knowing and managing the content that you are uploading on your website will help the audience to understand your business and working more effectively and easily.
Content management will also reduce the efforts and time that you would have to invest for managing, balancing and correcting the data on your website. Along with this basic benefit, you also get the benefit of reduced uploading time of the content which directly affects the loading and response time of your website. Hence, you must only put the relevant data on your website to avoid the unnecessary delays in uploads.
8. Reduced number of comments
Your audience will be very much interested in knowing the information that you are putting on your WordPress site in the form of the article. Having some comments on your post is okay and acceptable but allowing any type of comment to be visible in your posts is not acceptable.
Rather you must reduce the number of comments that appear on your post and manage it to only a relevant number with relevance to the post. This will cut short the time the post will take to upload and also will help the readers to get the genuine idea about the content of the post’s information.
9. Compressed format
Remember how easy it is to use the compressed form of data for uploading, transferring, etc. The same ease can be felt when you are dealing with your website. Compress the entire data that you are sending, uploading or transferring from the website. This will reduce the overall time that you require and thereby increasing the loading and response time of your website by making it perform better and effectively.
10. Enable content delivery network
It is a not so common fact but the speed of your website depends upon the two major locations. First is the location where you are locating and the second is from where the website is hosted. If there is not a balance between these two then there will be certain delays in the performance of the website’s loading time.
A content delivery network helps in managing all the data of your website and putting the files on the static servers which are located very near to the client side. Whenever the client request for any of the service from your site, these servers will help the files reach to the clients as fast as possible. It is just like reaching your destination via the shortest route.
11. Homepage optimization
The very first thing that the visitors will notice about your WordPress site is your homepage. The visitors will get the very first impression of your website from the homepage of your website. Thus you must always take necessary steps when optimizing the homepage for the website. Optimizing the homepage and making it relevant to your work will help it get loaded easily and quickly and thereby increasing its speed.
One of the ways by which you can optimize your website is by removing the irrelevant and unnecessary data from your site. Only keep the data and things that contribute to the relevance of your work.
12. Ditch hotlinking
Hotlinking is the process when the other sites directly link from their articles the various links on the images which are available on your website. This direct linking to the various sites adds to the loading time of your website and thereby reduces your performance. This can also cause unnecessary scrap posts being linked with your site’s images that have no relevance to your site and this will downfall your reputation in the market.
Thus, you must reduce the use of hotlinks as much as you can in order to avoid unnecessary of the linking of other sites to your websites. This will automatically increase your site’s speed.
13. Optimize database
This is something that most the people ignore and don’t take into account. As most of the people concentrate only on the outer side of the website and don’t really bother with what’s going on inside. But along with managing the outer performance of the website, it is equally important to balance the internal functioning of the site.
Optimizing the database of your website is one of the tasks that you must take care when trying the various ways of improving the speed of your WordPress site. You can try the plugins like WP-Optimize or WP-Database Manager for enhancing the process of database management.
14. Fix all broken points:
One of the easiest ways to make your website work and load really fast is by fixing all the broken points that it has. For this you would have to analyze the website on regular basis and then to note down all the points where you find the performance of the website is lacking. This can help in fixing the damaging part and thus to make the website perform better on those fronts.
15. Minify your CSS and JS files:
You can make your website perform faster and better by minifying the various CSS and JS files available. The process to minify the CSS and JS helps in removing the white space, combining the various files along with reducing the number of unnecessary comments on the posts. This in return helps the site to get rid of the not so necessary complications and help it to load and perform at a much faster speed than ever.
16. Try faster plugins
To improve the speed of your website, it is recommended to use less number of plugins. No doubt plugins are important for the speed of the website but that does not mean that you have to use each and every plugin that you know or come across. Rather you should select and reduce the number of plugins to only those that actually contribute in the enhancement of the website’s speed.
17. Disable trackbacks
If your WordPress site is accessing the trackbacks, then it is obvious that it will interact with the other blogs and blogging sites that are equipped with the same. However, this interaction may not seem any trouble initially but will increase the loading time after some time. Whenever any of the other blogs and blogging site mentions your site anywhere, you will get a notification for the same. This will keep updating the data in the post. It doesn’t require much of an explanation that too much of data on the post can reduce its performing time by increasing the loading time.
Thus to avoid any such problem, it is always advisable to turn off the trackbacks by making adjustments in the settings of your website.
18. Use the best plugin for cache
Plugins are one of the essential factors that help any site to reduce its loading time and enhance its speed. Just like the other sites, WordPress also uses a number of plugins for the same. However, it is always beneficial to use those plugins that are in the caching category. These plugins provide all the required benefits to the sites that it need to improve their speed and reduce the loading time.
Out of the many, W3 Total Cache is the most popular one that is trending in the market and is being used by all the leading blogging sites. The other popular cache plugins that are used are WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, Comet Cache, etc. These can be easily installed along with offering easy and reliable use.
These are some of the basic ways that can enhance the speed of your WordPress site along with delivering you better and optimized results. How do you keep your website speed and load optimized, any other way? So, CleanTalk optimizes their anti-spam and security plugins to improve your website speed and these plugins are one of the fastest.
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I am always on a lookout for ways to increase my website’s speed. I tried making some changes in my css style script but had only a little effect. I liked the whole article but specially point numbers- 7, 10 and 12. Going to try these things. Thank you for this really informative article.
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