Best Ways to Speed up a WordPress Site With Ease

Last Updated: Posted On: July 20, 2020 0 Comments Post Views:  [post-views]
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Website performance, for sure, impacts on your business because it has a large and measurable effect on conversion rates. Even though your website has the perfect design along with simple and intuitive navigation, you should never underestimate the importance of site load time. A slow WordPress website tends to impact your business negatively. So make sure your worldwide users have more accessible and faster web experience. Through this article, we will help you understand how to speed up a WordPress site. After reading this article, you will be able to accelerate your website speed and maximize your revenue.

WordPress is arguably the best CMS platform in the world. According to a survey, over 400 million websites are using WordPress today. As compared to other CMS platforms, it has over 60% of the market share. We have already discussed why WordPress is better than other CMS in one of the previous articles. It provides you with a wide range of features along with an easy and interactive user interface. Besides, the plugin support is just great. The WordPress plugins help you add additional functionality to your website. So overall, WordPress has everything that you need for creating and managing a website.

Slow Loading Website

Although it is easy to create a website on WordPress, managing it is a bit challenging. One of the most common issues with WordPress websites is slow performance. Most of the website owners regularly face this unpleasant situation. Your users may compromise with how your website looks, but they will never like a slow loading website. Even a few seconds delay is enough to irritate your users. So if you have a slow loading website, you are at a higher risk of losing your subscribers or customers. Whenever users land on your website for the very first time, you have to capture their attention, and you only have a few seconds to do that. So if your website takes too much time to load, most of your visitors will be gone before you can do anything.

If you have a slow loading website, it can never achieve a good search engine ranking. Google keeps changing its algorithm, and now it has included the site speed in its ranking algorithm. This means the rank of your website will now also be dependent on the loading speed. If your website is slow, you will not only lose visitors but also your search engine ranking will get reduced.

Factors That Affect Website Speed

Before moving to the main part of the article, i.e. how to speed up a WordPress site, we should get familiar with the factors that affect website speed. But before that, you should find out how fast or slow your WordPress website is. You can analyze your website performance with the speed analysis tools like PageSpeed Insights from Google, GTmetrix, or Pingdom. These are a few easy to use speed analysis tools. They will analyze your website and show you how fast or slow your website is.

A WordPress website can become slow due to various reasons, such as:

  • Web Hosting: Your website performance is majorly dependent on web hosting. If you have not configured your web hosting server properly, it may slow down your WordPress website.
  • WP Configuration: Your server can be overloaded if your WordPress website is not serving the cached pages – causing your website to load slowly or crash down entirely.
  • Page Size: Another important factor on which your website speed is highly dependent is the page size. If the size of your web pages is too large, it will slow down your website.
  • Faulty Plugins: WordPress plugins are used to add additional functionality to the website. But if you are using a faulty plugin, it can slow down your website significantly.
  • External Scripts: Sometimes external scripts like ads, web font loaders, etc. can also impact your website performance negatively.

As now you are familiar with the factors that can affect website speed, it is time to learn how to speed up a WordPress site.

How to Speed Up a WordPress Site?

Below are the highly-recommended techniques to speed up a WordPress site: Since WordPress hosting service plays an essential role in your website performance, you should always choose the best hosting service. If you want to use a shared hosting provider, then Bluehost is the best option for you. And if you are interested in a managed WordPress hosting service, you should consider using WPEngine. Both these providers can optimize your WordPress website in the best way possible.

  • Heavy WordPress themes take a lot of time to load and make your website slow. Make sure the WordPress theme you choose for your website is lightweight and speedy.
  • WordPress plugins are very useful. For almost every purpose, there is a dedicated WordPress plugin. A WordPress caching plugin can drastically improve your website load time. W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are the two most popular and highly recommended WordPress caching plugins.
  • The homepage is the most important part of your website because people land there most often. So make sure your homepage is well optimized to load quickly. By using a clean and focused homepage design, your homepage will not only look good but also load quickly.
  • If you have large images, they can slow down your web pages or the entire website. So make sure the images you are uploading to your website are well optimized. Image optimization is a process of reducing the file size without affecting the quality. This can easily be done with the help of SmushIt, a WordPress plugin to optimize images.
  • Avoid uploading audio/video files directly to WordPress because doing that will cost you bandwidth and slow down your WordPress website. Instead, use the WordPress built-in embed feature. Copy and paste the video’s URL directly into your post, and the video will be embedded automatically.

Conclusion

A slow website will impact the revenue of your business negatively. It could cost you thousands of visitors as well as conversions. You have to make your website load faster to meet users’ expectations. In this article, we have learned how to speed up a WordPress site. So go ahead and try out the techniques shared above to accelerate your website speed and maximize your revenue. Do not forget to analyze the load speed of your website before and after using the above techniques. You will be surprised to see the changes.

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