Tips to Speed Up WordPress Performance

January 23. 2020

One of the most important topics among users of WordPress is how to improve and increase its speed. If you happen to be searching for a way to make this happen, you are in luck. There is a myriad of various techniques nowadays to speed up WordPress performance. As experts in this particular CMS, WP Full Care offers useful insight into most useful tips and tricks to make your WordPress website faster than it used to be.

What are the reasons to speed up WordPress performance?

When it comes to improving your website’s speed and performance, there are reasons aplenty to put in your finest efforts. Most of them are already well-known to website owners, whether you are using WordPress or some other platform. Namely, the loading speed of your pages has a direct influence on the satisfaction of its visitors, as well as overall traffic, conversions, and bounce rate. And all of these, ultimately, affect your profits. It is, therefore, safe to say that doing your best to speed up WordPress performance is an absolute must. Even more so if you are running a WordPress e-commerce store. You don’t want to keep online buyers waiting!

So, there are basically two capital reasons to work on your WordPress website’s speed:

1. Low speed equals lost visitors

According to numerous statistics and researches, the human attention span has dropped by a staggering 6 seconds since we entered the new millennium. So, if your website takes more than three seconds to load, you can expect to lose nearly half of your visitors! Consequently, almost 80% of your website visitors will never return if they are dissatisfied with its performance.

2. Your website’s speed is one of the ranking factors on search engines

Since the ultimate goal of search engines is to present the users with the best search results – a site that has slow loading time will certainly not be among them. And even though speed is not an official ranking factor, it is certainly one that has an influence on your search position.

Google will see your slow-loading website increasing your bounce rate and users hitting the back button instead of waiting for it to load. And it will downvote your website and as one that offers low quality.

Ways to improve your website’s speed

As mentioned above, there is a number of ways to speed up WordPress performance. Let us have a closer look at the most significant and the most useful ones.

1. Pay attention to your choice of WordPress hosting

The number one factor influencing your WordPress site’s speed is your hosting. Although hosting your website on a shared provider seems like a decent idea, the environment it provides doesn’t offer good loading times during peak traffic hours. Shared hosting also provides poorer performance for your website, as a result of sharing the same server with a number of other sites.

However, given that the web-hosting industry managed to make some progress with its technology, you are able to opt for a cloud hosting provider. Although setting cloud servers can be a vexing task, you can always seek professional assistance and leave your website maintenance to experts.

2. Be careful about your framework/theme

Were you aware that the default WordPress theme – the Twenty Nineteen theme – is quite lightweight and shows good results when it comes to performance speed? Unlike the other complex frameworks that offer numerous features you might never actually use – this theme keeps its “core” simple. What should you do in order to improve your website’s performance? Choose a solid framework with no excess plugins and custom edits. By opting for customizing right from the theme, you’ll be able to avoid “bloating” and keep your website’s speed at optimal levels.

3. Reduce image sizes

When it comes to the size increment of any given webpage, the major contributors are the images. What you need to do in order to speed up WordPress performance is to reduce their size without compromising their quality.

By optimizing your images manually, you’ll probably waste a lot of time. You can avoid doing so by choosing to use one of the WordPress plugins that can give you a hand with image optimization, such as  Optimole, WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimizer.

By simply putting one of the plugins such as these to use, you’ll be able to reduce the size of the images on your site, thus increasing its speed.

• Extra tip: there really is no need to upload images larger than 300KB. By having images whose width is over 1920 pixels, you’ll be putting an unnecessary burden on your website’s database.

4. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

As people who visit your website come from various places and countries in the world, the loading speed of your WP site will be different depending on where the visitors are at the moment. What does a CDN do precisely? It takes all the static files you have on your website and allows visitors to download them. It does so by serving those very files on servers that are as close to your website’s visitors as possible. This will definitely help speed up WordPress performance for users who are visiting your site from faraway locations.

5. Take care of your WordPress database

Clean up. Optimize. It’s a rather straightforward way to speed up your WordPress website. Delete unwanted files and data and this will definitely help reduce the size of your backups. Also, make sure to delete any spam comments, old drafts of the content on your website, as well as fake users. In order to speed up your website even further, you can even delete unwanted plugins and themes.

• Extra tip: use only the plugins that you really do need. There are ways to avoid installing a plugin and thus slowing down your website – by using just a few lines of code that you can easily find on the Internet.

There are numerous ways to help speed up WordPress performance. In the last six months, Google has changed the manner it grades sites (Google Page Insights) and getting good speed ranking, especially when it comes to mobile performance, has become more difficult. In order to avoid having an unsuitable theme and unnecessarily burdening your database, your best option is getting the help and advice you need by contacting professional WordPress developers to provide you with the most appropriate ways to improve your site’s performance.