Top Ways to Speed up Your WordPress Website/Blog
Expert tips and tricks for improving the performance of your WordPress website/blog.
You'll understand why speeding up your WordPress website is essential for its success if you've ever checked a new website and struggled to stay awake (or break your monitor) while waiting for it to load. The website's fast performance is crucial for a great user experience as well as for peace of mind. It will influence how customers see your website and cultivate trust (or mistrust) in your brand, but that's not all it does.
Because it affects the site's bounce rates, conversion rates, page views, and other important web analytics metrics, site speed is a significant component of search engine optimization (SEO). In other words, it will assist you differentiate yourself from other internet firms of a similar nature and outperform your main rivals.
However, optimising the performance of a WordPress site may go from being really simple to being extremely difficult in a matter of seconds. We've created this step-by-step guide on how to speed up your WordPress site as a result, in order to assist you.
Also Read About Website Hosting vs WordPress Hosting
Before making any changes to your website's performance, you should assess how bad (or great) the speed of the site genuinely is.
The performance of the website can be impacted by the visitor's nation, their Wi-Fi signal strength, and if the website is being cached by their web browser, even though there are no universally applicable indicators to guide the way.
Nevertheless, you should use some of the best internet performance testing tools (like GTmetrix or Pingdom) to see how fast your website is. To achieve this, visit one of these websites, paste the URL of your home page into the box, and hit Enter.
You'll learn how your website works and receive advice on how to speed it up a short while later.
When it comes to WordPress plugins, more is not always better, just like with most things in life. Even if there are a tonne of strong WordPress plugins available for almost everything (both free and paid ones), choosing the best ones is preferable to having a tonne of them, especially if some of them have been sitting around for a long.
The more plugins you employ, the more resources (such as RAM and disc space) they will require to function correctly. Thus, your website will load more slowly.
Check the plugins you're currently running and remove those that aren't being used. Next, look through those that are in use and deactivate any that don't seem to be very useful.
Though you probably don't want to jeopardise the stability of your site, remember to test it after deactivating each plugin.
You can select from a number of hosting options if you're looking for a WordPress-specific web hosting service, including shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting , virtual private server, and dedicated server hosting.
Even though you generally get what you pay for with most of these solutions, you still need to be sure the host you pick is reliable, safe, and helpful.
Don't forget to look into the company's history and see if there have been any recent significant security breaches.
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You should ensure that the version of PHP you're running is current because it powers all WordPress websites on the planet.
Similar to how plugins improve with each new version, PHP also offers better performance, including faster loading times.
However, if you're unsure of the PHP version you're running, contact your web host's support team or, if you're a self-starter, visit your host's help centre.
Along with removing all the plugins you'll never use, you should only choose the best plugins possible because they have a significant impact on how quickly your website loads.
In conclusion, choose small-sized plugins that won't use a lot of server space, and make an effort to keep them updated. Check the prerequisites, read the reviews, and test the plugin on your own to ensure that all of your plugins are as performance-friendly as possible.
Re-run the performance tests (discussed in the chapters above) after activating a new plugin to make sure your site's speed hasn't been affected.
It's a good idea to select a lovely yet lightweight theme in addition to lightweight plugins. While a theme loaded with high-resolution images and numerous effects can appear excellent at first, you'll reconsider utilising it once it burdens your server and hinders the performance of your website.
Start with a straightforward theme and gradually add more features, keeping in mind how they could impact how quickly your site loads.
It goes without saying that huge, poorly optimised photos consume a significant amount of space in your WordPress content folder and slow down your website. To prevent this, make your photographs smaller to conserve space without sacrificing their quality.
You can achieve this by purchasing image-editing tools (such as Canva, GIMP, and Fotor) or by utilising some of the well-known WordPress image-optimization plugins (such as EWWW Image Optimizer, Optimole, and ShortPixel Image Optimizer).
While it's nearly impossible to completely avoid redirects—some of your posts will be removed and moved—crucial it's to keep them to a minimum in order to maintain a passable level of performance.
Your page will load more slowly and perform worse overall with every redirect you make. Therefore, you should restrict the amount of redirects on your site to reduce the number of extra information requests your server handles (and prevent those nasty 404 errors).
Although updating your WordPress site and all of its components is important, even though it may seem obvious, we must stress this.
In its capacity as the most widely used open-source content management system (CMS) on the world, WordPress regularly updates both its core and a wide variety of themes and plugins.
Not only would running an outdated version of WordPress hurt your site's performance in terms of speed, but it could also expose it to other security risks. Therefore, to maintain both speed and security on your WordPress site, make sure everything is up to date, patched, and completely functional.