#day 18 21 TIPS ON HOW TO SPEED UP WORDPRESS SITE

I am posting the day 18th content of the 21 days writing challenge during the lockdown period of COVID 19 situation to help myself be consistent in sharing useful information on the platforms wherein it can be helpful for the readers. 

And I think I am somewhat successful in the same. Thanks a lot for appreciating my small initiatives to do better. 

Stay Home n Stay Safe. 

21 TIPS ON HOW TO SPEED UP WORDPRESS SITE

Though WordPress is a great platform, the users of this platform suffer due to its lack of speed. Everyone desperately wants to speed up WordPress because, with a slow website, any entrepreneur will be losing their customers. Those who visit the website for the first time are likely to lose their interest if the website is slow, and as a result, they will not make repeated visits.

Moreover, a slow website will be ranked lower by search engines since Google has included the speed of the site also in the ranking algorithm. When a website is made fast loading, the page views will increase due to better user experience, and the website will be ranked higher by search engines. When a website is slow, most of the visitors will leave the site even before it is loaded.

A case study has revealed that as a result of one second delay in loading of the web page, 7% of conversions will be lost, page views will go less by 11%, and customer satisfaction will go down by 16%.

Above all, websites that are slow will be penalized by Google and other search engines. Hence it is imminent for the online marketers to speed up a WordPress site in order to ensure more traffic, more customers, and more income from the website. Those who want to know how to speed up the WordPress site are sure to find the following tips quite useful.

Get to know these 21 Tips on How To Speed Up WordPress Site:

1. Choose the best web hosting provider

Image Source: altushost.com

A reliable, as well as a fast web host, is vital for the success of the WordPress website. InMotion Hosting is quite affordable, and its outstanding features are fast loading, excellent technical support, Free SSL as well as Migration, Good uptime, and a free domain. This is a trusted web host, and its performance is better than BlueHost and HostGator. InMotion Hosting will optimize the speed of the website for free.

2. Ensure that the WordPress theme/Framework is lightweight

Image Source: wordpressluv.com

The theme that you choose should be a lightweight, minimal theme and never start the website with too many features. The functionality of the site can be extended as and when required using plugins or with the help of a developer.

3. Get rid of plugins that are not necessary

Through plugins power up your site, you should choose your plugins very carefully. As a result of installing the wrong plugins, there can be a lot of performance problems. All the plugins are not equally good, and a few among them are not properly coded. If the plugins that you install are not functioning in harmony, your website will have compatibility problems.

4. Never use sliders to improve speed and conversions

Sliders will decrease the speed of your site, decrease conversions, and mobile users will have a poor quality user experience.

5. Give importance to image optimization

By way of optimizing the images, you can increase the speed of your website. When there are un-optimized images, the page speed will decrease. The images can be optimized using the plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/imagify/.

With this plugin, 25 MB of images can be optimized for free. The user interface of this plugin is simple and easy to use, and while uploading, the images are resized automatically.

6. Use a social sharing plugin which will not slow down the site

Social sharing plugins slow down the website because these plugins use a lot of JavaScript. Social Warfare is a lighter plugin and is optimized for speed.

7. The homepage of the site should be clear and minimal

Most of the visitors first view the homepage. The homepage is their landing place. When the homepage has too many features, the users’ attention gets distracted, and also it will affect the page load speed. An effective homepage will have minimal elements only.

8. Choose the best WordPress caching plugin

The WordPress caching plugin of your site needs to be very effective because the speed of the website and its performance are improved by caching, and consequently, the ranking of pages, as well as user experience, will improve. The load on the hosting server also will be reduced.

9. Compress JavaScript by enabling GZIP

As a result of allowing GZIP compression, JavaScript, web pages, and CSS will be compressed.

10. Optimize the WordPress database

When you optimize your database, the time taken by the browser to collect and return files from the database will be considerably reduced. WP-Optimize is a free plugin that is ideal for optimizing the database. This plugin is simple and easy to use. Minify JavaScript and CSS files to prevent slow page loads. When the files contain unwanted characters such as comments, line breaks, indentation, block delimiters, and White Space characters, the site will slow down.

11. Use PHP version 7.1

WordPress uses PHP as a programming language, and to ensure maximum efficiency of the site, you may update to the latest version 7.1

12. When any of the WordPress features are found not required, disable them

WordPress has many features. Some of the features are of great use, while some of them are of no use. All the unwanted features may be disabled using WP Disable.

13. Test the speed and performance of your WordPress website

When you test the speed and performance of your site, you come to know whether the speed is changed as a result of optimizing the website. At the end of the testing, you come to know the current page speed of your site. GTMetrics.com and Tools.Pingdom.com are the tools recommended for testing the speed and performance of your WP website.

14. Reduce external HTTP requests

Various WP plugins and themes load files of all kinds from other websites. The different kinds of files include scripts, stylesheets, and images from Google, Facebook, and analytics services, etc. Many of these files are optimized for fast loading. However, when there are too many requests from the plugins, the speed of the website will be reduced considerably. By way of disabling the scripts or merging them into a single file, the external HTTP requests can be reduced.

15. Install faster gallery plugin

You must use a WordPress gallery plugin, which is optimized for speed. Using this plugin, you can create awesome image galleries that will load at great speed. Envira Gallery is one of the best WP gallery plugins available in the market.

16. Avoid uploading videos directly to the WP site

When you upload videos directly to your WP website, the videos will be displayed in the HTML5 player. But it is not advisable to do so. Hosting videos will consume bandwidth, and the web hosting company will impose overage fees on you. They may even shut down your website. To prevent these problems, you can make use of a video hosting service like YouTube, DailyMotion or Vimeo.

17. Use Content Delivery Network (CDN) to speed up loading times

The loading times will be different at different geographical locations. This is because of the impact of the location of the web hosting server on the speed of the site. When a CDN is used, the loading time will be reduced for all visitors.

18. Display excerpts only to speed up loading times

WP will display the full content of each article on the homepage as well as archives. As a result, your homepage, tags, and all other archive pages will load slower. This will ultimately reduce pageviews. When the site displays excerpts only and not the full content, the loading will be done faster.

19. Update your WP website regularly

WP is updated quite frequently, and in addition to providing new features, it will enable the site owners to fix various security issues and bugs. The owner of the site must ensure that the WP site, theme, and plugins are also updated to the latest versions.

20. Use Cloudflare along with W3 Total Cache Plugin

When CloudFare and W3 Total Cache plugin are used in combination, the speed of the website will be considerably increased.

21. Turn off the pingbacks and trackbacks

WP will interact by default with the blogs that possess pingbacks and trackbacks. When the pingbacks and trackbacks are turned off, the setting that generates work for your site will be eliminated.