In today’s era, it’s important to increase the speed of your website.
A slow website can negatively impact the user experience, which impacts the efficiency and productivity of the website.
Relatively long load times will definitely affect the overall performance of your website, resulting in poor user experience, higher bounce rates, lower traffic and lost revenue.
Sit back and relax, follow this simple step-by-step beginner’s guide to speed up and optimize your WordPress website.
Here are a 9 ways to improve your WordPress site speed
1: Remove unnecessary plugins
Over the time, some plug-ins will become obsolete or eventually unusable. A good practice is to always remove plug-ins that is not currently active on your WordPress site.
2: Update your WordPress theme / plugins regularly
Unsupported or old plugins or themes may interfere with WordPress performance optimization, resulting in a very slow website. WordPress often rolls out updated versions to ensure that your website is updated regularly.
3: Caching your WordPress site
Caching is a systematic process that creates temporary or static versions of your WordPress site on your local server, instead of loading the entire site every time. Another way to greatly improve your WordPress site is to cache the site.
Another importance of browser caching is that it saves you money, bandwidth space and ensures that your website loads quickly.
The larger and more complex your website, the greater the amount of code and files stored in it. When your code becomes so large, it may begin to affect the overall performance of your website.
4: Upgrade to the latest PHP version
Due to the ever-changing technological world, PHP releases updates from time to time, more stable software versions, so make sure to upgrade your site to the latest and most stable PHP version. This not only keeps your site up to date, it also increases your site’s speed.
5: Get a good hosting service
Due to the cost of website hosting, most people choose a very cheap hosting service or an unreliable hosting company. This usually affects the speed of the website. Also, avoid using shared hosting for high-traffic websites, which may slow down other websites on the server.
I would recommend you to go with Liquid Web Managed WordPress Hosting for FAST blazing website. Read our Liquid web review here.
6: Enable lazy loading
Lazy loading is a process that allows images to be loaded only based on what is displayed on the user’s browser. That is, if there are 10 images on the website, the images will not load until you get the visible part of the image.
This process will greatly speed up your website while saving a lot of bandwidth and data for users who don’t scroll down to the bottom of the page.
7: Optimize your website’s database
The older the database, the more redundant and outdated files and information you get in the database. In addition, over time, the website database became so large that it began to affect the time required to deliver queries.
8: Use Gzip compression in WordPress
Gzip compression is of course another option you should consider; you need to enable Gzip compression for CSS, images and JavaScript files. This allows the web server to compress the file before sending it to the browser. This process significantly reduces the size of files transferred or rendered on the web server.
If you would like to add anything in the list above, let us know in the comments section below.