How to Optimize your WordPress Website to Load Faster than Ever!

Does your website load within 3 seconds? Do you know that Google considers the loading speed of any website in SERP ranking? If you know what website optimization and SEO are all about, you may already know about all of this. So, it is quite obvious that the loading speed of your website matters to the overall performance of your website!

So, if you’re interested in attracting more visitors to your website, propel the speed of your website, and get improved rankings on Google, this article is just your baby.?To start with, let’s understand why should you care about website loading speed?

If the study conducted by the Aberdeen Group is believed: 1 second of delay in page load costs the business 11% cut in page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction and 7% loss in conversions.?So it is something you are ready to lose?

In fact, considering this stat improving the loading page of your website should become your priority.

To improve your website performance, you first need to figure out the current speed of your website - what time does it takes to load. For this, you can use ManageWP?Performance Check tool or many other tools available online. Such tools will help you get an in-depth analytics of your website wherein you can get to know the website loading time, total page size, and many more stats that will bring a scorecard of your website before you.

This statistics will also help you realize which parts of your website need to be improved to achieve a faster loading speed.

Tips to Improve your website performance

Switch to a Faster Web Hosting Provider

This is the most important and handy solution to improve your website speed, yet the most overlooked website speed factor of all.

Do not get lured away by the low price plans and the marketing tricks of certain web hosting service providers and get trapped in the offers of poor server resources, leading to slow website performance, particularly when you use shared hosting plans.

Starting from the type of drives that are used to power up your web host servers to its RAM speed and processors - all these are liable for your website’s speed. Contact the right web hosting vendor and know its servers and the resources you can get for your hosting plan select the right one.

Compress Images

Images speak louder than text which also improves the readability and the user engagement rate of any content. Considering this concept, we usually fill our blog with lots of images. Do you know these images also reduce the loading time? It is always suggested to optimize your images to save a few megabytes off your total page size. Do not reduce the count of images but optimize and compress them into a smaller size.

Install a Strong Caching Plugin

Website caching plays an important role in improving your website speed by generating static pages of every post on your website so that when anyone reloads the same page it loads faster. You can install free caching WordPress plugins available like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. It could easily install with just one-click and does the job of website caching perfectly.

Implement AMP

Accelerate Mobile Page (AMP) is a great way that has revolutionized the way we browse websites on mobile devices.?Using this technology, the web pages load faster without any delay in loading of any page. Google is also offering high ranking to websites that are using this technology.

Update your WordPress Site

Keeping your website updated keeps you alert and your website faster.?Each update will not only give you new features, it also fixes security issues and bugs.?Remember your WordPress theme and plugins also require regular updates. Being the owner of your website, it’s your responsibility to update your WordPress site as you do for your mobile to ward off any virus, threat or bugs.

Use Excerpts on Homepage and Archives

Does your WordPress website displays the?full-length content of every article?on your homepage and archives? This may reduce the loading time of your website. Moreover, the visitor may not be interested to visit other pages if the entire article is visible on the homepage. This will reduce your page views, and the time your users spend on your site. Better to display only the excerpts of some article on your home page instead of displaying most of it. This will expedite the loading time and improve your page views too.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Using a CDN or Content Delivery Network can also elevate the loading time for all of your visitors. The CDN is a network of worldwide servers. Every server stores “static” files of your website. These static files are files like JavaScript, images, CSS, and not going to change unlike the WordPress pages which are “dynamic”. Using CDN, whenever the users visit your website they are offered those static files from the nearest server. Thus the loading time of the website gets faster.

Split Large Posts into Pages

Nowadays readers tend to read blog posts that are detailed are more in-depth. By default, these will be longer posts with a higher ranking in search engines. It is a good practice to publish long posts on multiple pages. Just add the?<!––next page––>?tag in your article where you want to drive the readers to next page.

Cut down External HTTP Requests

There are many WordPress themes and plugins that load all types of files from third party websites. These files could be style sheets, images, scripts etc. Although it is fine to use some of it, if your plugins are making a lot of such requests, it might slow down the loading speed of your website. So, it is better to reduce all these external HTTP requests. You can do this by?disabling styles and scripts or merge them into one file.

Synopsis

If you‘re dedicated to speed up the loading speed of WordPress sites, do not forget to follow above-listed tips as it all will optimize the speed of your website significantly. Though there is much more that you can do to make your website load faster and rank higher on Google, above listed are the most effective and popular tips.