WordPress is one of the most accessible platforms these days for building trendy-style professional websites. Although having your own business website is not enough, how your site performs on the cloud is also an essential part to be considered. Here the question is – why do you need to speed up your WordPress site? It will somehow affect your online business, i.e., if you have a slow WordPress website, visitors won’t wait for your site to load.
A famous report says that about 47% of visitors expect a webpage to load within 2 seconds or less. If a page takes over three seconds to load, 40% of the visitors will leave the website. Also, a one-second delay can cause a seven percent decrease in conversions, which could raise the bounce rate as well as result in poor search ranking. But now you can sort out these problems with easy WordPress tips. Let’s explore each of them one by one.
1. Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
CDNs are the network of servers positioned worldwide, sometimes also referred to as POPs. These networks are intended to host and deliver copies of your WordPress site’s static (or sometimes dynamic) content like CSS, video streams, images, and JavaScript. CDN is an additional method to increase the speed of your WordPress site by offloading your static resources from your central server. This offloading process allows your website to load quicker at the user end and your primary server free from this duty. The critical element of a CDN is to provide better loading time for your site, no matter what type of website you run.
Here you can try out some excellent options such as jsDelivr, CloudFlare, and CloudwaysCDN. Cloudflare presents a basic free plan that comprises active site performance, security protection, and STATS about your visitors. It uses a tech called Anycast to route your visitors to the closed data center. CDNs are primarily categorized into two types, i.e.,
● Traditional Pull CDN – These CDNs cache a replica of all of your content and media; however, a request from the client is still made straight to your hosting provider. For instance – CDN77 and KeyCDN
● Reverse Proxy CDN – It is somewhat different, although it still works like a CDN; reverse proxy intercepts all arriving requests and behaves as an intermediary server among the client and your host. Sucuri or Cloudflare are some excellent examples of reverse proxy CDNs
2. Image Optimization
A famous survey says that images comprise twenty-one percent of an entire webpage’s weight. You need to do image optimization to impact your page load times significantly. Big images slow down your web pages, creating less than most elegant user experience. It is the method of lessening their file size either using a script or plugin, which as a result, speeds up the load time of the page. You can do this by employing two conventional techniques, i.e.,
•Lossy
•Loss Less Compression
While formatting your images, you must have to keep up the balance between file size and quality. One of the most fundamental tactics is compressing them before uploading them to WordPress. Generally, it can be done in a tool like an Affinity photo or Adobe Photoshop, or else you can use the popular online Squoosh app. However, these tasks can be executed automatically through plugins.
Here two key components you need to consider are the file format (jpeg, jpg, png, GIFs) and the form of compression you use. By picking the proper combination of file format and compression type, you can even decrease your image size five times. You should use jpeg/jpg for pictures with plenty of colors as well as png for simple images.
After implementing image compression, how much faster your WordPress website will become depends on your original photos\’ sizes and what results after compression. Some significant speed test reports show that a quality image compression solution can reduce page load by over 80 percent.
3. Caching to speed up your WordPress site
Caching is by far one of the vital and most comfortable WordPress tips for website speed. But before proceeding further, let’s understand how it works and the different types of caching available.
Here the question is – What is Caching? Every webpage visited on your WordPress site necessitates a call to the server for processing, and then final outcome is sent from the server to the user’s browser. For example – you may have a header, a menu, images, or a blog as the server has to process overall requests; it takes a couple of times for the entire webpage to be sent to the user, particularly with clunky or larger sites. That\’s where a WordPress caching plugin gets into the picture.
Caching commands the server to store a few files on disk, depending on the configuration. Hence, it can memorize and replicate the same content it’s been allocated in the past. It mainly decreases the quantity of work desired to produce a page view. Therefore, your web pages load so earlier straight from the cache.
4. Apply Solid WordPress Theme
Themes play a significant role in WordPress as they either catch your visitors’s attention or distract them. It is the reason that’s why you see a lot of themes in the WordPress ecosystem. Everyone is usually attracted to free WordPress themes and some premium WordPress themes that have never-ending post-display settings. Various free themes put tons of needless code on your WordPress site, or else they wouldn’t follow the WordPress themes guide. Therefore your website loads slowly due to numerous calls to your server/database. Default WordPress themes are always speedy, well-coded, and easy to customize, but you can buy some premium themes or hire a coder.
If you are looking for a clean and lightweight theme, then select the Genesis framework and GeneratePress. For creating a fancy site without sacrificing speed, pick Elegant themes.
5. Enable Expires header in WordPress
When somebody stays on your website, the visitor browser downloads overall files from your server to the visitor\’s device and renders your site. Enabling the expires header will let you set a particular expiration time for your static content. In plain words, it can be said that if you enable the expire header for static resources. Then on the second stay of the same visitor, the browser doesn’t download similar content and shows resources from the first visit if it does not expire.
6. Utilize Minified Resources
Almost all sites use CSS or JS files to beautify, which are several in number. Each plugin and theme that you adjoin to your blog includes a number of CSS or JS files. If browsers connect with your websites via HTTP v1 protocol in this condition, they download merely four files in a parallel way. See if your blog has 20 plus JS or CSS files. Then how much time browsers spent to link your hosts and getting them to showcase your site to the visitor?
For this dilemma, you can choose plugins such as WPRocket and Autoptimize. They minify or merge your static resources in one or two archives and then send these records to the visitor. It will help to speed up the whole procedure.
7. Optimize Your Database
You can optimize the database via PHPMyAdmin or through plugins like WPOptimize, WPRocket, and WPSweep. If you are using default WordPress comments, then these plugins can delete pending spam comments. They also delete post revisions, past drafts, and loads of things. WordPress optimizing database can provide your massive site boost in the WP speed-up process.
8. Stop Hotlinking
When one website uses another’s platform resources, it is called hotlinking. For instance, if somebody has copied an image from your website, once his website is loaded, it loads the picture from your site. It represents that it is consuming bandwidth or resources from your server. In simple words, hotlinking is a massive bandwidth, i.e., killer. To stay away from such hijacking, you are required to put unique code lines in your WordPress .htaccess file. Hotlinking could even reduce the speed of your site to a large extent if you never disable hotlinking at the right time. It is to be one of the perfect WordPress tips to speed up a website for better results.
9. Minify or Compress Website Files
Minification and compressing is, in fact, a process for making your website code more efficient. It merely removes additional content in your code so that it runs faster. Minification can be done effortlessly without interacting with the code. For example, you can employ an online tool to minify code directly in your browser. Here, you can use Minify or CSS Compressor, as they both facet user-friendly interfaces and generate outcomes rapidly. But for a WordPress site, the top choice is generally a plugin.
You have ample alternatives; however, the most preferred is Fast Velocity Minify; it is a free, open-source, or extremely user-friendly tool. This plugin will automatically minify every single JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code. Just activate the plugin, and the default settings will work speculates and also avails many customization alternatives for advanced users.
10. Do Routine Maintenance
It’s vital because WordPress site plugins can be an easy target for hackers. Most of the time, you are not able to pay attention to your website or not update it regularly. Hence the principal reason for the hacked WordPress site is not to update plugins. Always delete or uninstall plugins that are not needed, as they will deplete the speed of your website by calling unnecessary resources.
