Nowadays, everything revolves around speed and efficiency in the digital world. Your site’s performance is being directly affected if it is loading slower than it should, and your traffic is suffering as well. There is no doubt that WordPress websites are quite slow, so developers and business owners wonder how to speed them up. The following information will give you an understanding of why you need a fast-loading WordPress site, and you’ll even learn how to optimize it for increased speed.
WordPress Site Speed
The world has been captivated by the power of WordPress, a powerful content creation tool. It is estimated that at least 75 million websites have been created using the platform. Adding plugins, themes, and other tools to make your website look perfect and help your branding stand out is that you’ll need them as with any other website creation tool. Although these tools can improve performance, they can also cause things to slow down regardless of the content management system you use.
If you’re interested in speeding up your site, there are some easy steps you can take. It is relatively easy to improve the performance of your website by effectively managing your themes, images, plugins, and other content. Remember that a customer can enjoy your page’s full functionality only after the entirety of the content is loaded, whether it appears on the page or runs in the background.
You might wonder what a fast loading speed has to do with whether or not your page is enjoyed by visitors. The problem may be that they are not able to enjoy anything at all because your page takes too long to load.
Why Is Site Speed Important?
An old dial-up modem is now technology history, but the screeching sound it made indicates that your webpage will eventually load. Fast loading webpages are now expected by consumers. A majority of survey respondents stated in fact that they would abandon a site if it took longer than three seconds to load.
Fast WordPress websites are the most effective way to boost your business. In other words, without these things, you’ll probably lose your traffic and money. There is a certain amount of impatience among online consumers. According to recent data, over half of all mobile users abandon pages solely because they do not load as quickly as they expected. Additionally, websites with loading speeds of less than two seconds enjoy conversion rates three times higher than those that take five to ten seconds.
Furthermore, your website’s performance may discourage potential clients from finding you at all if it runs slowly. A recent announcement by Google indicates that page speed will be a determinant of ranking in mobile searches by July 2018. As a result, slow loading sites have a negative impact on your SEO ranking. There has never been a more appropriate time to learn how to speed up WordPress sites if you are having trouble with your WordPress site you can visit WordPress Development Toronto.
Site Speed Is Even More Important for Mobile
You might not know, but Google indexes mobile searches based largely on the speed with which they receive results from mobile devices. Despite your website is a bit slow, you can still secure a decent rating depending upon certain search terms. Nevertheless, Google prioritizes sites that respond to mobile devices quickly.
The number of Americans who only use their mobile phones for internet access skyrocketed to one in five in 2008. Consider using a modern WordPress theme and responsive-designed plugins if you’re concerned about the speed of your mobile site.
How Fast Should a Site Load?
The question then becomes, just how fast is fast enough? According to Google, keeping your load time under three seconds is the best practice. When loading times increase from one to three seconds, the probability of a bounce (a user leaving immediately) increases by 32 percent.
The probability of a bounce increases by 90% for sites that take longer than five seconds to load. To ensure that visitors stay on your site rather than leave, you should strive for an average loading time of fewer than three seconds (or as close to that as possible).
How To Decrease Page Loading Times
In order to help these tools create a fast WordPress site, you can perform several simple tasks on your own to make that happen. Caching your website is an easy way to improve its performance. The following are several other tips that might be helpful.
1. Run a Site Speed Diagnosis:
A key component to improving the performance of your system is knowing how fast your website loads. In case you install a plugin or make another change to your site and want to see how it affects the loading speed, you should track site speed.
Using a WordPress-specific site speed tool such as the WP Engine Speed Tool will help you optimize your loading speed. We’ll send you a custom analysis of your site’s load time and specific recommendations for improving it by the time you insert your URL.
Alternatively, you may also use the WP Engine User Portal to test your web page’s response time to site changes. Even without having to set it up manually, Page Performance lets you schedule recurring tests to be sent to your inbox.
2. Delete Unused Plugins and Themes
In addition to keeping your plugins and themes updated, the next step to a speedy site is to delete unused ones. Furthermore, unused plugins and themes can lead to security vulnerabilities and negatively impact the performance of WordPress sites.
You must first deactivate the unused plugin before you can delete it. When you are finished, you can delete the plugins you no longer need by going to your inactive plugins list.
See this useful article for information on cleaning plugins on multisite networks.
You can delete unwanted themes by going to Appearance > Themes and selecting the ones no longer in use.
3. Clean Up Your Media Library
If you do not use the images you have accumulated over time, you will have them stored away. It is a good idea to remove unused media in order to free up space.
If you would like to dispose of unused media manually, you can use a plugin like Media Cleaner or perform the action manually. For example, going to Add Media -> Media Library -> Unattached and deleting these files no longer in use will take care of removing any unused media.
4. Clean Up Your Database
Unchecking this option will result in your WordPress database becoming cluttered over time. Your site can be slowed down by this unnecessary bloat. The good news is that through regular database cleanups, you can reduce the size of the database.
For instance, revisions after a post can consume a considerable amount of storage on the server. If you have a post that is 100KB of data and five revisions of that post, the total space wasted is approximately 500KB.
Cleaning up your database can be done manually through phpMyAdmin, although can be tricky and damaging if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you aren’t a technical whiz, installing a This process can be accomplished more safely with a plugin. It’s easy to get rid of things such as old revisions, spam comments, MySQL queries, and more with WP-Sweep and Advanced Database Cleaner.
5. Remove Render-Blocking Javascript and CSS
Using a page test tool to evaluate the speed of your website might have brought up the following recommendation which is difficult to understand. A waterfall view of your webpage can be seen on services such as webpagetest.org or Pingdom. If you watch your URL, you’ll discover that JavaScript files (.js files) are loading before you click “start to render”. JavaScript that renders blocking is known as render-blocking JavaScript.
JavaScript’s primary function is to perform an action on a webpage, such as opening a popup or rotating an image on a slider. Those actions do not need to be loaded until your site is completely loaded with content and styles. The “Defer JavaScript Parsing” feature essentially says, “load this stuff later on in the page rather than at the top of it.” There are a couple of plugins you can use to defer this JavaScript, including WP Critical CSS for WordPress.
6. Minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript
Several CSS, HTML, and other source code files can accumulate over time, causing your site to slow down. If you want to improve the speed of your site, you might want to consider minifying the code. The backend of your website will be optimized through minification in order to make it as lean and mean as possible.
This technique helps remove unnecessary characters, such as spaces and line breaks, from HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files, reducing their size. Data is transferred faster because a smaller amount of data is transferred, which means files run faster and web pages load faster. Minifying code can be done using a variety of plugins.
This task can be accomplished with the free plugin Autoptimize. The WP Rocket plugin is the best option for optimizing your website and reducing website load time. Besides the CSS Compressor, there is the CSS Minimizer, an additional tool you may find useful.
7. Optimize Images
A site visitor’s engagement is largely determined by the images that appear on it. It’s important to optimize images on your website to facilitate faster page load times, even if your site contains a lot of beautiful imagery. Images can be optimized through a variety of different methods, including compression, alt text, and title addition, and the creation of an image sitemap.
8. Lazy-Load Long Pages
Lazy Loading can be a real-time-saver for single-page sites and for sites with long home pages. By using lazy loading, your visitors will not see the lower-level elements of your page until they scroll down and look at them. Using this strategy, you are able to begin rendering a website faster, as the entire content of your long page does not need to be loaded at once. It is quite common to use BJ Lazy Load for this purpose.
9. Limit Comments Per Page
The thing is, while it is great to get a ton of attention on your blog posts, there is also the risk that it will slow the page load speed down. To improve site performance, dividing the comment section into a number of pages is a good idea.
Changing the “Break comments into pages” setting in Settings -> Discussion will limit the number of comments that appear on one page. Afterward, you can select how many comments to display per page (by default, 50 are displayed).
Especially for pages with many comments, this should enable us to consume less memory and speed up page loading times.
10. Reduce Redirects
The use of redirects is sometimes useful, but unnecessary redirects like 301 redirects and redirect chains can seriously slow down websites. In order to reduce the number of additional information requests your server makes, you should try to reduce them as much as possible.
Author Bio:
This article is written by Muhammad Usman. He is a young SEO Expert with big dreams and currently, working in an organization named Yazlo.CA. He can be found on Social media platforms like Linkedin.
