Is your site experiencing poor traffic? Sometimes it may be as a result of a slow website. In this web post, we shall look at some tips to help improve page speed on your WordPress website.
Increasing the speed of a WordPress site is not much different than the process used for optimizing the speed of a website hosted on a shared or a dedicated server. For that reason, you might find some of the tools like Breeze mentioned below as being similar to what you were doing to your shared website.
Why Should You Improve Page Speed On A WordPress Site?
If your admin panel is not working properly, it will affect your work and your time efficiency when managing the website, and your dashboard might become difficult to handle.
Besides that, visitors won’t wait for your website to load either. If something is not working as they want it to, they’ll go away. And worse, many of them won’t ever come back.
A study by Akamai in 2009 says that 47 percent of the visitors expect a page to load within two seconds or less. If the web page takes more than three seconds to load, 40 percent of the visitors will leave the website. Furthermore, a one-second delay can produce a 7 percent reduction in conversions.
If you’re not convinced yet, Dave Artz from AOL demonstrated in this study that page views drop off as page load times increase.
How to Speed up WordPress Site?
It is not necessary to try all of these solutions simultaneously for a faster WordPress website. Depending on your requirements, you can choose to use only a few of them.
So here we go!
1. Compress Media Files
Uploading very large images and videos will significantly slow your WordPress site down. For that reason, another solution to speed up a WordPress site is to compress your media files.
There’s a free plugin for WordPress that can reduce all your image dimensions automatically, so there’s no need to do this repeatedly for each picture. Alternatively, you can also try out WP Compress – an excellent image optimization plugin.
In short, smaller files will allow your pages to load better.
2. Use Light Weight Theme
There are many shiny and beautiful themes in the WordPress market. But don’t forget, themes with a lot of dynamic content, widgets, slider, sidebar, etc., can cause your hosting server to respond slowly.
Always optimize WordPress theme or use a lightweight WordPress theme. The default WordPress themes can be enough if you want to run a blogging website. For more features, you can use themes that are built on Bootstrap and Foundation.
3. Ask Your Cloud Hosting Provider
Before starting to take any actions, it’s recommended to ask your WordPress cloud hosting provider for their product and compatibility with WordPress. They can give you some tips and ideas on how to make your WordPress site faster. This will help you spend less time in optimizing your WordPress site speed efficiently.
4. Look for Inactive Plugins or for Plugins that Don’t Work Properly
Another solution to speed up WordPress site is by verifying if your current plugins are working correctly. Everyone uses various plugins and tools for various needs. They sometimes cause lag in your website, rendering it slow to load. You might give it a try and see how fast they are working.
To do the tests, you can get another plugin. It’s called the Query Monitor. This plugin is free and once installed, it will report any performance problems with your website.
If there are plugins that slow down your website, remove them or try to find alternatives.
Also, keeping a large number of active plugins will affect your WordPress site speed as well.
5. Install an Effective Caching Plugin
One of the most popular methods to increase the speed of your site is using a cache plugin. A caching plugin will store the final view of your site for any future visitors. This means that your WordPress won’t have to generate it for every following person viewing the site. This data can include HTML, JS and CSS code, images, fonts, and Flash files.
These are a few of the solutions you can try and implement for improving the speed of a WordPress site. Let this post encourage a dialogue down in the Comments section below. All thoughts are welcome.
Until next time, goodbye from the Mark & Ryse team.
