Website speed matters the most when it comes to competing with competitors for traffic and google ranking.
According to Google, 53% of mobile users abandon the site that takes over 3 seconds to load. Globally the use of the internet is increasing more and more, the average internet connection speed is also increasing. But this is causing internet surfers to become less and less tolerant day by day of low-speed load time.
So to retain the traffic and get good ranking in google for your WordPress site, let’s discuss the 7 simple steps which you can apply to speed it up quickly and effectively.
5 steps to speed up your WordPress website
- Select the best hosting provider
- Remove unnecessary plugins
- Theme selection and optimization
- Caching
- Use Content Delivery Network(CDN)
1. Select the best hosting provider
It may be the simple step you may think of but it really plays a vital role in improving your WordPress website speed. So, do your research before choosing any cheap hosting companies with WordPress minimum requirements.
So, before moving on to any type of hosting, you need to understand the requirements of your website and its performance. Does it require shared or dedicated hosting as these hostings have their own difference in pricing and performance level?
A. Shared Hosting
It is quite cheap in comparison to dedicated hosting as your website is supported and served by the server used by multiple other websites. With cheap service rate and price comes the limitations on storage, bandwidth, and performance of your website. Performance of your website is mostly affected by other websites as you will be sharing your website server with them. Shared hosting is preferred to websites with a low amount of traffic and user interactions.
B. Dedicated Hosting
In dedicated hosting, your sole website is hosted on the server. You will not share any kind of server resources with others. The only limitation you will get here is the limitation of the server itself.
It is expensive and highly recommended to the website with traffic and dynamic contents
2. Remove unnecessary plugins
First of all, search all plugins from your directories and remove the unused and unnecessary ones. It’s the easiest way you can think of to improve your site’s speed.
Once you are done with it then, then it’s time to review the plugins that are working. Look at the areas where your plugin needs optimization such as ineffective, repetitive and idle database queries and codes. For example, you can use WordPress’s own caching functions like get_option(), update_option() instead of using the SQL queries to make your site more faster.
3. Theme selection and optimization
Once you are done with your plugins, now take a look at selecting a suitable theme for your WordPress website and then optimizing it. Be wise and don’t select themes that take more time to load server and more time to load database queries.
After theme selection comes the optimization phase.
A. Image File Optimization
Don’t pollute your site with unnecessary images which are used nowhere, it will only add more load time. I know people prefer images rather than texts but whenever you find places where you can replace your images with text, just do it. And for the images which are used on your WordPress site, make sure they are all optimized in sizes and appropriate image formats(JPG/PNG/GIF) as the content requires.
You can use plugins such as Smush.it and WP Smush.it to make your task easier. This optimization is especially crucial when using sliders, as large and uncompressed images can significantly slow down the slider’s performance and the overall page load time.
B. File Size Optimization
You need to optimize all of your site’s necessary file size to lowest to make it load faster. So, think of the questions like ways to reduce your number file required to display avg. pages of your site? Combining and minifying common CSS file and JavaScript files.
Plugins such as Head Cleaner and WP Minify can be used for this task.
C. Database Optimization
While creating a WordPress site, it unwantedly adds up an unnecessary information that automatically inflates the size of your database. These data may be trash items, post revisions, spam contents, deactivated plugins and much more which cause your site to process low and steady.
So to remove this problem, you need to schedule a time to delete your trash after 2 days or just simply disable the post revision steps.
For the manual step of clearing out your trash after 2 days, simply add the code below in your wp-config.php file
define(‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’,7);
And to limit the post revisions, simply add the code below in your wp-config.php file
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’,3);
For completely disabling post revisions simple set the value of above code to ‘0’ or ‘false’.
4. Caching
Caching is a quick and simple fix to increase your site’s speed. With caching plugins available, you will be able to cache your WordPress websites post and pages as static files. The benefit of caching static files is that when they are served to users, they will be stored in your user’s browser and when they come back the loading time will be lesser compared to the time they load from the original server. In short, it saves page/post loading time.
But as the posts/pages of your site are difficult and dynamic, caching gets more complex.
5. Use CDN(Content Delivery Network)
A CDN is a gathering of arranged servers situated far and wide. These servers store your site records and will convey them to your visitors.
For example, in the event that somebody in Ireland visits your site, rather than it being conveyed from your server in America, they get the substance from the nearest server to them in that system (geologically).
Another preferred standpoint of utilizing CDN is that it can surrender you to half decrease in transmission capacity use. Setting up a CDN can take you a couple of minutes yet it can hugely affect your WordPress site speed if executed correctly.
Wrapping it up…
If you ever feel your WordPress site speed and load time is slow, then immediately measure your site’s speed in Google PageSpeed Insight tool and find out about the situation. This tool will not only give you the clear view of performance but also the areas you need to work on to improve your site’s speed.
Follow the above steps accordingly and in the meantime, you will have a WordPress website which will load faster and within 3 seconds of time frame.
