Do you want to speed up and optimize your WordPress website? Website loading time is a very important factor that impacts on SEO, Google rank and traffic. If your website loading time is very high then it will not rank on google and lose organic traffic. That is why the bounce rate of your website will increase. It is not good for your website. So, it is very important to optimize & speed up your WordPress website.
Why WordPress Website Speed Matters:
When a user visits the first time on your website, you must have to attract him/her to stay a couple of minutes. If your site takes too long to load, most of the people are gone, lost before you even had an opportunity.
In recent time, Google included site speed in their ranking factor. Meaning that your site’s speed effects on ranking and SEO, so if your site is slow, you will not get enough organic visitors from the search engines.
How to test the website speed?
The homepage of a website is typically used as a benchmark to check the loading time. There is a lot of tools and website to test website speed, here are three popular names are-
This three website will show the error and suggestion. If you can fix all the error and apply all the suggestion, definitely your website will be faster.
How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website:
There are many steps to speed up WordPress website. Here, I will discuss some topics to speed up and optimize your WordPress website. So, let’s start-
Choose a good web hosting provider:
Good lightspeed web hosting is a big factor for the website speed. If your host server the files very fast the site will load faster. But if your server performs slowly, then your site will be slow.
There is a lot of web hosting provider, but all are not good. You should research on it before purchase a hosting plan. Also, you can read one of our article Best WordPress Hosting. In this article, I shared some WordPress friendly web hosting providers. You can take any of them depends on your requirement. Here all I share shared hosting information, but if you go with a dedicated plan, it will improve your website more.
Maximum shared web hosting provides unlimited domains, unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth, and also the CUP is high performing then a shared hosting plan within your budget. But the problem is the provider sale this shared space with a lot of customers. So, if some site gets huge traffic and used maximum resource of the server, it may cause your website down or perform slowly. So, before purchase it, you should keep this on your mind.
Use a good theme:
The theme is mandatory for your WordPress website. But if it is a fancy theme with a lot of scripts and lots of extra unnecessary features. Then your website will perform slow. Your theme should contain only the features you need for your website design. You should avoid lots of fancy stuff and extra scripts.
So, when you will choose a theme for your website, you must have a plan and you should have the clear idea of your functionalities. If you choose a light WordPress theme for your website, it can increase your website loading speed.
Nowadays Google is focusing on the mobile-friendly design. So, if you choose a light design and simple theme, it will work perfectly for the mobile device and Google will rank your website faster.
Reduce, deactivate and delete extra plugins:
We use plugins to add more extra feature to our website which is not available in our theme. Some times we use lots of plugins which are not necessary for our website. Sometimes we use duplicate plugins, which provide the same features at a time. If we check carefully we can avoid this type of issues and make our site clean and well optimized.
If we can reduce the extra and duplicate plugin, it will save our server space too. So, it is better to think before installing new plugins. If you do not need any plugin you must deactivate the plugin and also delete it from your site.
Optimize image size:
Image is a very important property for a website. It makes your website elegant and attractive. Also, you need to use an image to show your ideas graphically. So, we can’t stop using images. But we can optimize all the images perfect for a website. Before uploading the image in the website we can reduce the image size and clean up all the hidden information from an image. There is a lot of free and paid tools you can use to do this.
Also, there is some image optimization plugin for WordPress website. You can check some of them –
- Imagify
- Wp Smush
- Optimole
- EWWW Image Optimizer
- ShortPixel Image Optimizer etc.
There is another formate to serve better image for web and it is highly recommended by Google. It is called WebP image. WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. It will make your website super faster. You must try this for your website.
Serve scaled images website:
Sometimes we used a big image for the website, even if it is a thumbnail image. For example, if we need image size 300 x 300, we can use double size 600 x 600 but most of the time we use triple or more. It is not good. If we serve scaled image it will improve the website speed.
Use a good speed up optimization plugin:
Another option is to use a good speed optimization plugin for your website. If you use an optimization plugin it will help you to improve your website speed. There is a lot of optimization plugin. But I recommend you to use WP Rocket. It is very easy and almost zero configurations. Just install and active. Automatically it will increase your web site speed. Though there are some more options if you enable it will improve your website dramatically.
There are some more speed up plugins like –
- WP Rocket
- WP Fastest Cache
- WP-Optimize
- Autoptimize etc.
You can take one and use that plugin to optimize your website.
Minify JS and CSS files:
A WordPress website is built with a combination of theme and plugins. All theme and plugins are using lots of CSS and JS files. It makes your website slower. To fix this issue, you can minify all the CSS and JS file and also, can combine in one file. It will make a fewer server request and make your website faster.
Served cached website:
Website cache is very important for website speed. There are some plugins can help you to serve the cached website. There is two option for cache
- Site Cache
- Browser cache
- Server cache
Site Cache
A site cache, or also known as an HTTP or page cache, is a system that temporarily stores data such as web pages, images, and similar media content when a web page is loaded for the first time.
It remembers the content and is able to quickly load the content each time the web page is visited again.
Browser Cache
A browser cache is a kind of client-side cache, which means it’s also a type of site caching. It works in the same way and it’s a cache system that’s built into a browser.
Files and content that are saved are stored on your computer and are grouped with other files associated with the browser you use.
A browser cache temporarily saves these kinds of content:
- HTML pages
- CSS stylesheets
- JavaScript scripts
- Images
- Other types of multimedia content
Server Cache
A server cache is a type cache that’s related to site caching, except instead of temporarily saving content on the client-side, it’s stored on a site’s server. Server caching is also fully handled and administered on the server without any involvement of the end-user, or a browser.
The server caching include, but aren’t limited to:
- Object caching
- CDN caching
- Opcode caching
Cleanup WordPress Database:
Delete unwanted data from your database will keep its size to a minimum and also helps in reducing the size of your backups. It’s also necessary to delete spam comments, fake users, and old drafts of your content and perhaps even unwanted plugins also as themes. All of this may reduce the size of your databases and files.
Here, I have discussed some topics and give some tips about how to optimize & speed up your WordPress website. If you follow these steps properly, I believe your website will more be optimized and load faster.