How to speed up WordPress is definitely a hot topic these days. Fortunately, there are several techniques you can use to get the job done. So, our intention is to list here every trick that we know about that can make your WordPress site a lot faster.
Why Do You Need To Speed Up WordPress?
There are many reasons for ringing alarm bells, some of which may be a cause for great concern for you:
- Search engines (such as Google) rank websites with faster-loading times than those with slower-loading times. Therefore, if you want to improve your position in the SERPs, improving speed should be one of your priorities.
- Studies have shown that site-loading speeds of more than 2 seconds usually result in about 47 percent of visitors opting out of a website. Therefore, to keep the interest of about half of your audience, you should increase the speed of your WordPress.
- Online shoppers are the most impatient; They expect the page to load within a second. So, if you are running an e-commerce store on WordPress, it is better that you be prepared to make major improvements so that your business can become more profitable.
How to test the loading time of your website?
First things first, you need to analyze the current load times for your website. Keep in mind that this speed may vary on each page, as it depends on various factors, namely:
- The size of that particular page,
- How many requests does it generate, cached or not,
- And finally, what kind of content (static or dynamic) it hosts.
The homepage of a website is commonly used as a benchmark to test load times. To check the speed of a website, the following three tools are widely used across the web:
- WebPageTest.org
- Tools.Pingdom.com
- PageSpeed Insights (It doesn’t actually report page loading times, but highlights elements you can change to speed up WordPress)
Okay, now it’s time to start some business! Here are 11 ways to speed up WordPress:
1. Choose A Best Web Hosting Provider
The major factor affecting the speed of a website is the hosting of your WordPress website. It may seem like a good idea to host your new website on a shared hosting provider that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, space, email, domain, and more. However, the point we usually miss with regards to this offer is that shared hosting environments fail to deliver good loading times at peak traffic hours, and most fail to provide 99 percent uptime in any given month. There are.
Shared hosting provides poor performance because you are sharing the same server space with countless other websites, and not being told how many resources others are using. Also, you don’t know exactly how well optimized the servers are.
Thankfully, the web-hosting industry has advanced with technology, and the prices of cloud hosting providers have come down with the passage of time. At the present time, you can buy dedicated cloud servers from GreenGeek, SiteGround, DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services and even Google Compute Engine at a nominal cost. However, setting up those servers can be a daunting task as you need to set up the servers from scratch. There are web hosting providers like Cloudways (where I work) that make the task of setting up customized cloud servers as easy as click and launch.
2.Use A Light Weight Theme Or Framework
With lots of dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, social icons and many other dazzling elements, WordPress themes look very eye-catching. But remember this: If they have too many elements and high page size, they will definitely stall your web server.
Using a lightweight theme is the best option here. One solution is to go for one of the default WordPress themes. Another is to try something like Neve.
Alternatively, for a feature-rich website, you can also opt for a theme that uses a good framework like Bootstrap or Foundation.
