Undoubtedly, WordPress is the best platform to build a professional level website with less effort. Most of the users choose it for the easy-to-use and user-friendly characteristics. Apart from all these positive signs, it has also a common weakness that makes you sufferer sometimes. Yeah! We are talking about site speed. Today, you will find a lot of stuff in this article related to WordPress website speed. Before reaching the central point, let’s introduce you some simple but essential terms.
Table of content
- Why Website Speed Does Matter in WordPress.
- How to Check Your Site Speed.
- Frustrating Reasons Behind A Slow Site.
- Tips To Speed Up Your WordPress Website.
Why Website Speed Does Matter In WordPress?
There are several reasons to give your concern on website speed. You can’t even think your expected outcome without ensuring speed optimization properly. The question would arise that how does it matter actually? Well! Here are some solid facts that describe the importance of WordPress website speed.
Website Ranking
Google has recommended website speed as one of the essential ranking factors. It suggests faster websites to the audience. People always love to visit a speedy site that takes less time to respond. So, you should be careful in improving website speed to make a good impact on search engine optimization.
Audience Behavior
What does an audience do after visiting your site? The first thing to the audit of a web page is its speed. Nobody chooses to stay a heavy website that takes too much time to open. Statistics show that audiences don’t interact positively if the loading time takes over 2 seconds. So, try to understand the audience behaviour and make sure you have a faster website than others.
Business Impact
This is maybe the most crucial part that indicates a lot of things together. Did you ever visit a slow e-commerce business site? Does it seem positive to you? Never! At this time of high-speed technology, the customer expects the fastest service from every business. If someone finds your website slow, he/she won’t come back again. That means you are losing potential customers for this reason.
How To Check Your Site Speed?
Before going for speed optimization of your site, you need to check it. The exciting thing is that many webmasters don’t consider their sites as slow. Maybe they can’t feel it from their devices. There are several speed checking tools to assist you. In this segment, you are going to learn how to check your website speed. Nothing to worry! The tools are free to use. So, let’s move to the points below.
Pagespeed Insights
Pagespeed Insights is most probably the most popular online tool to check your site’s speed performance. It is a free-to-use application and has well-written documentation. When you start analyzing page performance, it shows you the detailed report and suggestions to improve the score. It provides both desktop and mobile performance as well.
Pingdom Tools
Pingdom is a powerful speed monitoring tool. It shows a complete performance metrics including page’s overall load time and the number of requests of your website. You will get the performance grades summarizing the results of the test it takes from seven different continents. It doesn’t need any complex setup. So, anyone can use it and check the site speed performance quickly.
GTmetrix
GTmetrix is another popular application for testing your site’s performance. Just like the other tools mentioned above, you will get all the features, including the report for optimizing your WordPress website’s load time. It shows the problematic area and also the ways to solve it. As a beginner level user, GTmetrics can be beneficial to find the proper solution. For some advanced features, you may choose the paid version of this tool.
Frustrating Reasons Behind A Slow Site
Why does a website turn into a tortoise? What can be the reasons behind the scenes? Let’s find out the essential facts so that we can solve them correctly.
Unnecessary Plugins
Plugins are prevalent things while running a WordPress website. Not every plugin will always be used. It is a severe reason to slow down your site.
Unoptimized Images and Files
Experts don’t suggest using unoptimized photos and some WordPress file. When you are providing high-resolution images, it uses a lot of bandwidth.
JavaScript Issues
There is no doubt that JavaScript helps to make your website more interactive and functional. But if you implement it incorrectly, then it causes significant delay to load the web pages.
Hosting Provider
Choosing low quality hosting provider makes website speed slower. It is one of the important reasons for website performance.
Coding Quality
In many cases, developers don’t care about writing structured and clean coding. That’s why it makes your site slower than others.
Outdated Themes and Plugins
It is not a good practice to use outdated themes and plugins in WordPress. Your site may face a terrible loading issue for this.
Server Location
Server location is another factor in a website’s loading time. If you run your site for Japan and the server located in Germany, it can take much time to respond.
CDN service
Avoiding the Content Delivery Network can make your web content response slower. It is useful when you got visitors from different locations around the world.
Avoiding gZip compression
With this system, your files can be synchronized in a single place together. Many users avoid it and thus increases the loading time.
Cached Data
In many cases, cached data make your site slower. It keeps the previous data and makes your website slower.
Tips To Speed Up Your WordPress Website
Now, it’s time to describe the tips to increase the performance of your website. Not necessary you have to think of these as the bible. But it will help you with the best possible solution. Let’s have a look below!
Be Sensitive on Choosing A Web Hosting Provider:
A good quality hosting provider can be useful in several ways for your site. What do you think before choosing a hosting company? There are some essential criteria to follow. It should deliver a stable and guaranteed uptime. Besides an affordable payment plan, you should consider on speed, space, bandwidth, and top-notch support facility. You won’t get proper speed if it uses the overburdened server from low-quality hosting service. We recommend some international service providers like
Use The Most Light Weight Theme:
Using a lightweight theme is the most common and essential criteria in WordPress speed optimization. There are several themes with structured code and take less time to load. We suggest premium themes from popular and professional providers. RadiusTheme has some fastest loading themes that work smoothly. You may choose from them.
Remove or Deactivate Unnecessary Plugins:
Sometimes some plugins remain unused in the directory. This kind of stuff can affect your site speed. So, it’s better to remove or deactivate the plugins for having a better performance. Besides the page loading issue, keeping unnecessary and idle plugins also affects your website security.
Install A Reliable Caching Plugin:
Using a reliable caching plugin can ensure you to make your website quicker. It generates static HTML pages of your WordPress site. You can use any of the free plugins from the WordPress directory. Most of the webmasters recommend WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, and WP Rocket.
Minify JavaScript and CSS Files:
It is another technical but easy term to speed up your WordPress site. Whether you test your loading speed, you may see the suggestion to minify JavaScript and CSS files as well. We recommend some popular plugins for you. These are Autoptimize, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, and WP Rocket, and more. By using this, you will feel the outcome which will amaze you. The tools help you to reduce JS and CSS calls. Thus it takes less server response time.
Use Optimized Images:
Images are another multi-media content that takes more space compared with normal text. So, always try to use optimized photos in your site. You can do it in different ways. Make the cropping to resize, caching or compressing of your images. It increases website performance significantly. There is some image compressing tool to do it with less complexity. You may like EWWW Image Optimizer, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, WP Smushit, or any other one recommended by experts. Check the performance after following the process and see the outcome. You will definitely feel glad than before.
Use A Content Delivery Network:
Whether you are getting extensive traffic from different regions in the world, it will take different time in loading the page. A trusted Content Delivery Network comes with a solution for you. It ensures loading contents from the nearest server location for the visitors. Most of the famous WordPress bloggers are using this to keep the best ratio of site speed.
image source hackernoon.comCompress and Optimize Media Files:
Large media files, including images and videos, can hamper in website speed. The file size is an enormous factor in site performance. The solution is to use these after compressing. There are a lot of free plugins to do it automatically. You can also compress and resize the file size manually or with the help of online tools.
LazyLoad Images And Videos:
This is another factor that is not familiar to most of the beginner level WordPress users. LazyLoad is the process where the object won’t load until the visitor scroll down the page. You can use it for media files like video, content, and images as well. Some caching plugin offers this feature for free. Otherwise, you can use any specific plugin that is used very often for this task.
Update Required Files Regularly:
WordPress files including themes and plugins notify about their updated version of their products. Be very sensitive to make the regular update. Just visit the dashboard of your site and look through the files you are using. It will show you the present condition. It is one of the essential parts of improving your WordPress website speed.
Always Use The Latest PHP Version:
Many of the WordPress users are not aware of this simple issue. Good quality web hosting companies always use the latest PHP version on their servers. The latest version gives you the advantage to get a faster loading page.
Reduce External HTTP Requests:
Whether you are using a CMS to build your website, you have to be concerned about reducing external HTTP requests. It’s essential to make it as low as possible. Use some modification in the function.php file or simply use a plugin to do it.
Limit or Disable Post Revisions:
WordPress creates unnecessary revisions in your database while you are writing. There are two ways to control. Either you disable the revisions or set a limit for this. You have to put a simple piece of code in the wp-config.php file. Here is for disabling it.
define(‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 300); define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 3);
If you want to set the number of revisions, just put the digit (2,3, or any other) in the position of ‘false’. If it seems complicated to you, install a plugin to do it automatically. Some of the popular and reliable plugins are WP Sweep, WP-CLI, and WP Revisions Control.
Optimize WordPress Database:
While you are using WordPress, it’s necessary to clean your WordPress database regularly. It may include spam, trashed posts, post revisions, tables, and more. You can do this with the help of any simple WordPress optimization plugin. We suggest some safe and reliable plugin names like WP Cleaner Pro, WP-Optimize, WP DBManager, WP Sweep, and more. It helps you to do the optimization process in just a few clicks.
Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks:
Pingbacks and trackbacks are the two common features that show the notifications of getting links from other sites. It seems good in some cases but not always. It has the chance to get spam comments and an extra load to your server. Thus it can cause slowness to your site. We sorted out the solution for you. You can make disable this from the dashboard settings of WordPress administrator panel.
in the Default article settings area, you will find the checkbox to enable or disable the function. Just clear the checkbox ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles’. If you don’t want to change any settings by yourself, then try ‘No Self Pings, Disabler, or any other reliable WordPress plugins.
Finishing Thought
So, still thinking to make your website quicker? We provided the most straightforward tips to speed up your WordPress website. Hopefully, you got the crucial points to improve your website performance. Most of the experts suggest these tactics that bring a better result. Here, you found some essential tools which are mostly free to use. Do you have some other suggestions to boost up a website? Feel free to share your practical knowledge to help our valuable audience.
