Learn How to Increase Loading Speed of WordPress Website

One of the major factors that impact a website’s traffic level and its ranking on search engines is the loading speed of the website. In most of the cases, if the loading speed of a website is low, users tend to switch to other websites with better page loading speed. Several tools help in giving detailed insights into the speed performance of a website.

The process of increasing the speed of a website starts with the web hosting of the WordPress site. In this article, we would be discussing how to speed up a WordPress site in 2020 and different methods that you can apply for the same.

Ways to Speed up a WordPress Site:

1. Consult your Cloud Hosting Service Provider

Before taking any action, it is advisable to consult your hosting provider for the product and its compatibility with the WordPress site. The service provider can give you some useful tips to make your website faster. This would help you in saving a lot of time while optimizing the WordPress website for speed.

2. Install a Valuable Caching Plugin

A caching plugin is a popular method for increasing website speed. It stores the final view of the website for future visitors. This way, WordPress doesn’t have to produce it separately for every visitor. The data includes JS, CSS, and HTML code, along with fonts, images, and flash files. Before you choose and install a particular plugin, it is advisable to check with your hosting provider for any recommendations.

3. Try Out a Content Delivery Network

A Content Delivery Network or a CDN is another way to speed up your WordPress website. Although there are several features of a CDN, it mainly focuses on enhancing the page loading time of your website, whatever kind of website you might own. Some of the content delivery networks that are well known are CloudFlare, jsDelivr, and CloudwaysCDN.

4. Remove Inactive or Broken Plugins

It is a good idea to check if the current plugins on your website are working correctly or not. Different plugins are used for different purposes. They can cause lag in the website, making it slow to load.

You can get a useful plugin for this purpose, which is the Query Monitor. This is a free plugin that can notify you about any performance problems with your website. It is advisable to remove any inactive or broken plugins and find alternatives to them as they can affect the speed of the WordPress website.

5. Compress the Media Files

Another way to speed up a WordPress site is to compress the files, such as images and videos, as large files can significantly slow down your WordPress website. One can get free plugins, which can help in reducing the image dimensions automatically. Besides plugins, you can also make use of WP Compress. It is a great image optimization tool that compresses the files and enhances the speed of your website.

6. Compress the Size of WordPress Site

A small size website loads much faster than a huge website. You can make use of GZip compression, which can help in reducing a website’s size by more than 70%. After you compress a website, it would load fast as the bandwidth gets reduced. You can do GZip compression by installing and activating a plugin- Breeze WordPress cache plugin.

7. Keep the Website and Database in the Same Data Center

Check whether the website and the database are present in the same data center. This is important in the case of servers and hosting. Having both these in the same data center would enhance the performance of the website and make it easy to fetch posts from the database. Contact your hosting provider to find the location of your server. In some cases, companies also show the location of the servers during signup.

8. Optimize the Website’s Homepage

Keeping the homepage simple and avoiding using useless widgets is a great way to optimize a website and improve its loading speed. Do not display the posts at full length. Instead, show an excerpt or only the first paragraph from the text. Showing too many posts at once can increase the page loading speed of the website. The cleaner the homepage, the faster the website would load.

9. Update your WordPress

One should keep their WordPress site updated at all times. Be it a theme or a plugin, ensure that they are up to date at all times. In case there is a new patch, test an update on a staging site of WordPress before putting it on the live site.

10. Minify CSS and JavaScript Files

Reducing the JavaScript and CSS files helps in reducing the server response time and minifying the size of the files. This will help in increasing the site loading speed and make it much faster than before. It will also help in saving bandwidth usage. These files can be minified using the plugins Breeze and Autoptimize.

11. Install a Light Weight Theme

Although there are many options when it comes to themes in WordPress, it is advisable to use themes that do not have widgets, dynamic content, sidebar, slider, etc. as they ensure that the hosting server does not respond slowly. Having a lightweight WordPress theme is the best option in this regard. Having a default WordPress theme is enough if you have a blogging website.

12. Keep a Control on Post Revisions

Post revision is a very good feature to have in WordPress. It is not possible to have all the features for every website. Some users have low database space and disk space. In a post revision, a new copy of the post gets saved whenever the content is changed. This can increase the size of the database, which can create many problems and reduce the page load speed. Post revisions ensure that there is a check on unnecessary storage, and the website is optimized.

Conclusion

The website loading speed plays a key role in making the website a success. It can impact the conversions, bounce rate, as well as the search rankings. The above were the different techniques to speed up a WordPress website.

Author Bio: Swathi S, an indispensable member of the Stan Ventures SEO team, is the current outreach specialist at the organization. Known for her way with words, Swathi is a frequent blogger who keeps a tab on the latest SEO updates and guest posting services at the firm.

You can reach her at Facebook | Linkedin

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