Do you have a WordPress website but it’s slow and you don’t know what to do? Well, there are several things you can do to make it faster and have a good score on the Google test.
Your website speed has a big impact on your Google ranking and having slow pages is not a good option. Your site must load faster in order to reduce the bounce rate.
And in this post, you will find a few ways to consider when creating a WordPress website. These tweaks will increase page load dramatically.
And don’t listen to remarks that WordPress is broken, it’s slow, and so on. WordPress has a kind of bad reputation because most of the websites are not optimized correctly.
WordPress is a great tool for creating websites, and you can create any kind of website, such as blogs, agencies, portfolios, online stores, and much more.
Website Speed Test Tools
There are many tools that can test your website speed and you can do it completely free.
GTmetrix is a very popular tool for speed tests and it can give you complete reports on your website. Also, you can try tools such as Pingdom, Google Insights, and FastOrSlow.
You can test your website on every tool and see what different features all these tools have and choose your favorite tool for website speed test.
Let’s start and see what we can do to make our website faster.
Choose A Good Hosting
The first and the most important thing in website speed is hosting. There are hundreds of hosting providers with different types of hosting plans. Such as Shared web Hosting, WordPress Hosting, VPS Hosting, Windows VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Servers. You can choose the right web hosting solutions according to your website needs
You can find cheap hosting that costs as low as $1 but is it good? Does it perform well? Of course, not. But they have their purpose.
If your website is a simple one, with a couple of pages, and doesn’t get a lot of traffic, simple hosting is cool. But for big sites, you need better hosting.
The cheapest solution is shared hosting which is great for small websites, but for bigger and growing websites purchasing VPS or cloud hosting is the best solution.
They are fast and the speed difference between shared and cloud hosting is huge. And that’s because, on shared hosting, many websites use the same resources where on cloud or VPS you have your own, dedicated resources.
So, for bigger websites, I recommend VPS or cloud but for small ones, shared should be enough. Also, migrating WordPress websites from one host to another is not a big problem.
WordPress Theme Is Crucial
The second most important thing in WordPress speed is the theme. Without a good theme, you can’t have a fast website. And there are many popular WordPress themes that don’t work well.
A theme should be clean and well-optimized for WordPress and it must be built for speed. You may find beautiful templates on marketplaces but once you install them, you will come across many problems and speed is one of them.
Instead, you can use premium themes from professional teams. They are optimized and regularly updated and improved. Most of these themes have free versions so you can try them first and then decide to buy.
There are many free templates you can try. DroitThemes are fast and modern. The library includes templates for different types of websites.
You can test them and see how fast and easy to use they are. These themes also come with pre-made templates and great features.
Use Few Plugins
One of the reasons for slow WordPress speed is plugins. Of course, you need plugins in order to work properly but many plugins will cause bloat. Also, some plugins may break your website.
It is a good practice to use as few plugins as possible. This means that you only have to use the plugins you need. But also, use high-quality plugins.
Many free plugins that are from unknown sources can be a big problem. They may have a bad code that will cause bloat. Or it can be a source of a website hack. Always use plugins that have good reviews and many installs.
If you build websites with Elementor, then Droit Elementor Addon is a great plugin. You can add unique widgets and make beautiful websites. It’s fast and has a great team behind it.
You definitely need to use some caching and security plugins too. Other than that, there are very few plugins you may need. It depends on the website type and features it needs to have. So, choose well-known plugins and the only plugins you need.
Cache Is The King
And one of the must-have plugins for WordPress is the caching plugin. The cache is a great way to increase website speed. So, you have to use it.
What cache means is that it saves your website version in cache and when a visitor comes, the request doesn’t go through the server and database. Instead, it shows the cached version of your website.
There are different plugins for that and they do almost the same thing but some plugins have more features than others. Also, not all plugins work great.
You need to choose the best plugin for caching. Because the bad one can break your website and make it slow. Also, choose a caching plugin that has several features such as page caching, Gzip compression, preloading, etc.
Although there are some great premium plugins, you can use free ones too. If it’s made by a good team and has many installs, you can use it.
Optimize Images
And the last thing you can do is to optimize images. Because images are one of the main reasons for slowing down your website.
Big, uncompressed images are no good. You have to try to create small images with the resolution a theme requires and also compress them without losing the quality.
Also, consider the type of image. You can use JPEG or PNG. But the better solution can be a WebP format. It’s faster and lighter and from WordPress 5.8 it is supported.
Although there are plugins for compressing images, I recommend compressing and optimizing them externally, and this way you will need one less plugin.
You can optimize image resolution in tools like BeFunky and compress them on TinyPNG. It can reduce the size of an image up to 80% and quality loss is almost unnoticeable.
But if you don’t need to spend time on image optimization, you can try plugins like Smush which is a great image optimization tool.
Wrap Up
If you follow these steps and implement them on your website, you will see the difference immediately. Start from hosting and theme because these two are the most important, and then try caching and reducing image sizes.
You can use the recommended tools or try other plugins you already know. But be careful, always choose tools from well-known sources.
