12 Easy Tips to Speed up Your WordPress Website

According to recent studies, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, the visitors are highly likely to not return to your website anytime soon. In a world that moves fast like Flash, we need to have speed like Superman to keep up with it. Having a well performing website is more important than just having a website. It is immensely important to ensure that your website has all the tick boxes checked when it comes to performance. And the feature that is among the top elements of the tick boxes is the speed of your website. How long your website takes to load, how much time it takes to navigate through the different pages of your website all is part of the feature. There are many ways to give your website a boost when it comes to speed. In this article we will narrow down to the easy tips that you can implement on your website to make it faster than before. These 12 tips are easy to understand and implement. Before jumping into the details, let’s have a look at a few tools that can give you an idea on how your website is doing in terms of speed.

Tools for Checking Website Speed

You can easily check the speed of your website from the following to websites. There are many platforms that are offering the similar feature, however we are listing the two that we recommend using due to their accuracy. 

• PageSpeed Insights by Google
• GTmetrix

You can easily use these tools to get an idea of how long it takes for your website to load. Based on this you can get an idea of the current performance of your website. Now, if you have alarming performance when it comes to speed, get on board with these 12 easy tips to speed up your website. 

Ensure Good Hosting

The first step of speeding up your website is ensuring you have a very good hosting provider. Many times individuals and organizations get lured in with offers like “unlimited” bandwidth, emails and many more. But there is a catch, these types of service are based on shared website hosting. And as there are many users at a time in a shared hosting plan, the speed seems to fluctuate for many. As a result, website speed tends to get slower than ever. Apart from that, if you purchase hosting service from a less efficient source, chances are there will be shortcoming in the performance. As a result, we recommend using only trusted sources from where you can purchase hosting. Using a trusted source will reduce your hassle by tons and also increase the overall efficiency of your website. To combat this issue, you can pick dedicated hosting and cloud hosting if you really want to have a website with satisfactory speed and loading time. Using dedicated hosting and cloud hosting will increase your chances of having a speedy website. 

Pick a Fast Theme

When building a WordPress website picking a suitable theme is one of the most important tasks. Each theme has different features and options catering to different needs. While picking a WordPress theme, you need to consider the speed of that theme. Picking a theme that is heavy will take a toll on the speed of your website. Few themes are buggy, comes with many widgets and options that lags down the speed of your website. Thus, pick a theme that comes with features but does not reduce the speed of your website. Lightweight themes can be a good choice to begin with. And even if you get yourself a theme with lots of features and widgets, try to keep the widgets to the bare minimum. Use options that are only a must have to keep your website fast. Along with that cross check the base of themes, if they are built on an updated version of BootStrap compatibility, the chances are the feature rich themes will also generate adequate speed. So, while choosing a theme for your website, be picky and consider the speed element sincerely. 

Go Easy with the Plugins

Plugins are an integral part of any WordPress website. With the help of different plugins you can enhance the overall performance of your website, get additional features, and increase the overall quality of your website. However, using too many unnecessary plugins might slow down your website. In that case, be careful while choosing the plugins because it will help you to speed up your WordPress website. There are plugins that you must have and there are plugins which are good to have. You need to strike a balance between which plugin is must have for you and stick to it. Adding too many plugins that are not necessary will eventually cause harm to your website rather than doing good. Thus, we recommend to use only those plugins that are necessary for you. 

Deactivate or Uninstall Plugins

If your website is already up and running and you have added many plugins already, then it is time to recheck the entire thing. Go to the list of plugins you have already installed and start nitpicking on the plugins. Scrutinize the features they have and the value they bring to you. Keep the plugins that are essential for your website and get rid of the rest. You can either deactivate the plugins that you do not need anymore, or uninstall them from your website completely. And uninstalling a plugin is not the end of the world. If you need it in the future you can always get it installed again in a few easy steps. It will help your site to gain more speed gradually. If you only use a WordPress plugin in certain areas of your site, you could also utilize a plugin like Perfmatters. They have a nifty Script Manager feature, which allows you to control where a plugin loads. It’s as easy as flipping a toggle to disable a script or an entire plugin from loading on a specific page, post, or even site-wide.

Reduce the Size of Your Images

The loading time of your site also depends on the media that are hosted in the website. Using too many images with large sizes tends to make the website slower. If the images are heavy, naturally it will take a long time to load. Along with that, it also negatively affects the navigation speed of your website. It will take longer to navigate from one page to another. In order to deal with a particular challenge, we recommend using plugins that can help you to reduce the size of your images. However, there are many plugins that can provide this feature but most of them tend to reduce the quality of the picture at the same time. In order to ensure this is not happening, picking a proper plugin will do the work. We recommend using WP Smush. This plugin will reduce the size of your images without compromising the quality. You can also use features such as bulk smush, to reduce sizes of images at bulk. The free features are good enough to ensure optimization of images. However, you can always get more advantage with the paid features of this theme. Apart from WP Smush, there are other themes that can provide similar features. 

Use a Content Delivery Network

Content delivery networks keep a copy of your website in different data places. The logic for keeping a copy in different data centers is to display your site to the visitors coming from different countries. For example: if your visitor is residing in the USA, the CDN will collect the version of your website from the nearest data center and display it to the visitor. By doing this, it will take less time for the visitor to see your website. Thus the overall loading speed of your page will be in your favor. You can easily use the different content delivery networks to meet the purpose of your website. There are many service providers such as Cloudfare that can give you the required service to use a content delivery network. 

Minimize JS and CSS Files

JavaScript (JS) and CSS files are very important to any website. With the help of these files it is easier to get amplification on a few features of a website. These files are used every time someone visits your website. For example: whenever a visitor is coming to your website, these JS and CSS files are sent from your web server to a web browser whenever there is a visitor on your website. Thus, the lighter these files are the faster they will be sent to the web browser. In order to fasten your website, you can use different tools to reduce and minimize the size of JS and CSS files without hampering the implication of the files. This is one of the easy tips to speed up your WordPress website because you do not have to do it manually. If you install the right plugin, it will take care of that for you. You can use the Autoptimize plugin or similar plugins. This plugin will minimize the size of the files and will fasten the website loading time. 

Refrain from Hosting Videos on Your Website

Even though you have the option to host videos and audios in your website, this should not be practiced at any cost. Uploading videos directly to WordPress will take a toll on the speed of your website. Even though WordPress allows you to upload video and audio that should be avoided under normal circumstances. WordPress also has a built in video embedding feature. With this feature you can easily embed video and audio from different sources such as YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud etc. Use the video embedding feature to showcase video and audio files. With this feature, you can simply copy paste the link of your video and audio and embed your video in the website. This will ensure your website is not heavy and not taking more time to load.   

Install a Cache Plugin 

A Cache plugin is another tool for optimizing the speed of your WordPress website. The task of a cache plugin is to create a static HTML version of your website. So whenever a visitor comes to your website, it shows the static HTML version. It reduces the time taken to load the page. This is the basic function of cache plugin. Apart from that, there are other features that come with the cache plugins. With the help of this plugin you can also optimize image and other elements that will eventually increase the speed of your website. There are many cache plugins that you can pick from and use in order to generate the required results on your website.
  

Optimize WordPress Database

As you go on with managing your website with WordPress there will be many information stored in your database. There will be many data that is not necessary for you. With the passage of time, these data will get pilled and create a lag in your loading time. To improve the overall performance of the website, it is better to clean these unnecessary data from your website database. In order to do that, you can make use of different plugins that provide similar support. WP-Sweep is one of the plugins that come with the required feature. You can optimize your WordPress database by removing trashed versions of the data, posts, tags and more in just a few clicks.   

Another easy way to get the speed of your website high is to optimize the home page. By optimizing the home page we mean using lesser and lighter contents on the home page. For example: use less images and videos on your home page, show excerpts of contents instead of full length contents, get rid of unnecessary widgets and options to give a simple outlook to your home page. By doing so, you will reduce most of the unnecessary elements from your home page and this will increase the overall speed of your website. 

Keep Your Website Updated

It is very important to keep your website updated. By updating we refer to updating your theme and the necessary plugins. Newer versions might have better features, better speed and loading time. So be really attentive to the plugin and themes you are using. It will help you to keep your website fast and speedy in the long run. 

These are the easy tips to speed up your WordPress website. We have listed the tasks that you can do by yourself or very easily. These easy tips will speed up your website gradually if you keep on doing them regularly. 

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