11 Easy Ways to speed up your WordPress website
WordPress sites perform optimally straight out of the box. However, site speed can diminish due to various factors, such as bloated themes and plugins introducing excessive code and functionality, non-optimized images and media files being hosted on servers using excessive resources, inappropriate or insufficient hosting services, lack of caching mechanisms, high external HTTP requests, obsolete software, and database clutter. The synergistic effect of these issues can significantly reduce a WordPress site’s performance, resulting in slower loading times and an unfruitful user experience.
To learn how to improve your WordPress website’s loading speed, explore the various approaches and solutions available.
Why should you speed up WordPress?
Website speed is a crucial aspect of website development as it significantly impacts user experience, a website’s SEO performance, and overall success. Slow-loading websites tend to deter visitors, resulting in high bounce rates, and reduced engagement. Fast-loading pages, on the other hand, encourage longer visits, heighten conversion rates, and enhance user satisfaction. Search engines such as Google also place more priority on websites with faster loading times, thus affecting search rankings and organic traffic.
As such, website speed serves as a fundamental factor for businesses seeking online success.
Steps to speed up your existing WordPress website
Website speed is a crucial aspect of website development as it significantly impacts user experience, a website’s SEO performance, and overall success. Slow-loading websites tend to deter visitors, resulting in high bounce rates, and reduced engagement. Fast-loading pages, on the other hand, encourage longer visits, heighten conversion rates, and enhance user satisfaction. Search engines such as Google also place more priority on websites with faster loading times, thus affecting search rankings and organic traffic.
As such, website speed serves as a fundamental factor for businesses seeking online success.
1. Deactivate and delete unused plugins
It is advisable to prioritize quality over quantity while selecting WordPress plugins for your website. It is essential to remember that each plugin adds a substantial burden to your website’s processing speed as it functions as a small software program. Running an excessive number of plugins simultaneously may drastically impact your site’s load time. Additionally, plugins that you are not actively using might continue to execute unnecessary functions, thereby consuming valuable resources. Therefore, it would be beneficial to assess your plugins and trim down the ones that are not contributing to your website’s efficient functioning.
To locate the most resource-intensive plugins, it’s highly recommended to utilize New Relic, however, this tool does come with a price tag(hohoho).
If it’s not within your budget, another alternative would be to install the Query Monitor plugin and to refer to this guide on identifying sluggish plugins. Upon recognizing inefficient plugins, it’s best to either remove them or search for a substitute.
2. Optimize images and videos
Bulky images are an enemy to website speed. Optimizing images is an essential task for website owners who aim to improve the loading time of their WordPress site. You can optimize your site’s performance by reducing file sizes of large images. You may refer to this informative resource on how to compress your images without compromising quality. By implementing this practice, you can enhance your website’s speed and, as a result, provide a better user experience to your visitors.
Here are a few suggestions for improving image and video quality on WordPress websites:
- Compress and optimize images and videos using tools like Photoshop or TinyPNG.
- Use appropriate image and video formats (e.g., JPEG for photos, PNG for graphics, and WebM or MP4 for videos) to balance quality and file size.
- Enable lazy loading to defer the loading of images and videos until they come into the user’s viewport.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute images and videos across multiple servers, reducing latency and improving load times.
- Utilize lazy loading (most caching plugins and themes have this option).
- Use an image compression plugin like ShortPixel (affiliate link).
- If you are using videos, upload them to YouTube and embed them with lazy loading enabled. Never upload videos straight into WordPress.
3. Implement a Content Delivery Network
Real-world distance is another common cause of poor performance. Your pages will load slower on devices that are farther away from the physical location of your web server.
Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is an essential approach to enhance the efficiency of your WordPress website. A CDN comprises a network of servers distributed in different geographic locations, which efficiently delivers web content such as images, videos, CSS files, JavaScript, and more from the server that is closest to the user’s location. It helps minimize the load on a single server and reduces the chances of traffic spikes and server crashes. At the same time, it delivers outstanding user experience and improves website performance.
Therefore, if you are seeking to improve your website’s speed and user experience, incorporating a CDN is a solid step in the right direction.
