Khaled Khan 2 years ago
The success of your WordPress site is closely related to user pleasure, search engine rankings, and, ultimately, money. Yes, it is that crucial. Your site will become slower if it is not properly optimized. This, however, does not have to be the case.
To make your website as quick as possible, you can actively increase WordPress speed. You’ll discover why you need a fast-loading website, how to establish a baseline figure to work with, and how to improve your site’s overall performance in the sections below through WordpPress speed optimization.
You should optimize WordPress and your server to function as efficiently as possible, whether you have a high-traffic WordPress installation or a small site on a low-cost shared host. This article offers a general overview of WordPress optimization as well as particular recommendations.
Do you want to make your WordPress site run faster? Quickly loading pages improve user experience, increase pageviews, and aid WordPress SEO. This article is a complete guide to WordPress performance optimization, unlike other “X best WordPress caching plugin” lists or generic “X techniques to speed up WordPress” articles.
We tried to cover everything from why speed is important to what causes your WordPress site to slow down, as well as specific steps you can take right now to speed up wordpress sites.
When a visitor arrives on your website, you must immediately captivate their interest. If your site takes any longer, users will be frantically looking for the back button. In fact, both Bing and Google discovered that a 0.4-second delay reduced a user’s current and future visits to the site. Your user happiness will suffer substantially if your site loads slowly. Furthermore, in addition to leaving swarms of delighted users in your wake, your site speed has a detrimental impact on your results, as key on-page performance metrics are influenced by site speed. You’ll get smacked with the double whammy of dissatisfied users and poor search engine rankings if your site is slow to launch. It’s past time to change that.
It’s a good idea to acquire a base of your WordPress site’s current performance before you begin to make adjustments to increase its performance. Even if you believe your site is quick to load, it might be because you spend a lot of time on it. Cache files will be present as a result, and the page will load faster for you than for a new website visitor. GTMetrix and Pingdom are two tools that will offer you a solid image of your WordPress site’s current performance. Quickly run your site through the two tools listed above to get a baseline figure, then run it through them again as you implement the suggestions below.
Several recommendations for improvement will almost certainly be included in your speed test report. However, the majority of material is technical jargon that is difficult to comprehend for beginners. Understanding what causes your website to slow down is crucial to boosting performance and making better long-term decisions. The following are the key causes of a slow WordPress website:
1. Web hosting – If your web hosting server is not configured properly, it can slow down your website.
2. WordPress Configuration – If your WordPress site is not delivering cached content, your server will get overburdened, leading your website to become slow or even crash.
3. Page Size – Images that haven’t been optimized for the web.
4. Bad Plugins – Using a plugin that is badly coded might severely slow down your website.
5. External scripts, such as advertisements and font loaders, can have a significant impact on the performance of your website.
Your WordPress web host is critical to the success of your website. A solid shared hosting service, such as Bluehost or Siteground, will go above and beyond to optimise your website for speed. On the other hand, with shared hosting, you split the server resources with a large number of other clients. This implies that if your nearby site receives a huge number of users, it can affect the server’s overall performance, slowing down your website. On the other hand, using a managed WordPress hosting service will give you the most efficient server configurations for running WordPress. Managed WordPress hosting companies often include automatic backups, WordPress upgrades, and more complete security measures to protect your website.
Pages on WordPress are “dynamic.” This means they’re created in real time whenever someone sees a post or page on your site. In order to build your pages, WordPress must go through a method to find the necessary information, combine it, and then display it to the user. This procedure has a lot of phases, and it can cause your website to slow down if you have a lot of people visiting it at the same time.
Cache services are available from several WordPress hosting companies, including Bluehost and SiteGround.
If you use SiteGround, its SG Optimizer will be pre-installed on your WordPress site. This plugin includes all of the advanced capabilities found in premium WordPress caching plugins like WP Rocket.
If you’re using Bluehost, enable caching in the My Sites » Performance area. You don’t need a cache plugin if you’re utilising a managed WordPress hosting service because it’s built-in and enabled by default.
Images help to bring your material to life and increase interaction. However, if your images aren’t optimised, they might do more harm than good. Non-optimized images are one of the most prevalent speed issues we see on new websites. It is therefore advised to utilise JPEG and PNG as picture formats.
WordPress is often updated as a well-maintained open source project. Each update will include not just new functionality, but also security and bug fixes. Regular changes to your WordPress theme and plugins are also possible. It is your job as the website owner to maintain your WordPress site, theme, and plugins up to date. If you don’t, your site may become slow and unreliable, as well as subject to security risks.
WordPress background processes are scheduled tasks that run in the background of your site. Cron tasks for scheduled posts and updates, for example, have a minor impact on website performance. Other background processes, such as backup plugins and excessive search engine crawling, can, nevertheless, slow down a website.
WordPress defaults to displaying the full content of each item on your homepage and archives. As a result, your homepage, categories, tags, and other archive pages will all load slower. Another consequence of displaying entire articles on these pages is that viewers are less likely to go through to the article itself. This can decrease the number of pageviews and the amount of time users spend on your site.
Are you getting a lot of feedback on your blog posts? Congratulations! That’s a terrific sign of a receptive audience. However, loading all of those comments can slow down your website. WordPress has an integrated solution for this. Simply go to Settings » Discussion and select “Break comments into pages” from the drop-down menu.
Keep in mind how we said earlier that users in different parts of the world may have varied loading times on your site? This is due to the fact that the location of your web hosting servers might affect the speed of your website. Let’s imagine your web hosting company’s servers are located in the United States. Those from the United States will often have faster loading times than visitors from India. Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help your visitors load your website faster.
You can upload music and video files straight to your WordPress site, which will play them in an HTML5 player. However, you should never do so. It will cost you bandwidth to host audio and video. Even if your plan provides “unlimited” bandwidth, your web hosting firm may charge you overage fees or even shut down your site entirely.
It’s critical to pay close attention to performance optimization when choosing a theme for your website. Some themes that appear to be attractive and impressive are actually badly coded and can cause your site to load slowly. It’s usually preferable to go with a simpler theme rather than one with intricate layouts, flashy animations, and other unneeded features. You can always use high-quality WordPress plugins to add those functionalities.
Whether your site needs it or not, poorly built WordPress plugins often load too much bloat. This slows down your site and increases page load time. We frequently share our professional pick of best WordPress plugin showcases to assist you find the finest plugins. Usability, user experience, and, most importantly, performance are all crucial to us.
Longer, more in-depth blog posts are popular with readers. Longer posts also score higher in search results. However, if you’re publishing long-form content with a lot of photos, this may cause your site to slow down. Consider breaking up lengthy posts into different pages instead.
Several WordPress plugins and themes load files from other domains. Scripts, stylesheets, and images from external sources such as Google, Facebook, analytics services, and so on can be found in these files. It is acceptable to utilise a handful of these. Because many of these files are intended to load rapidly, it’s faster than hosting them on your own website. Your website may face significant delay if your plugins make a lot of these queries.
Sadly, there are many WordPress themes that are poorly coded. They disregard WordPress best practices and probably make direct database queries or make too many unnecessary database requests. This can cause your server to slow down significantly by overloading it with tasks.
After a while of using WordPress, your database will likely have a lot of information that you no longer require. You can optimize your database for better efficiency by removing all of the superfluous data.
The WP-Sweep plugin makes this simple to handle. It allows you to clean up your WordPress database by removing discarded posts, revisions, and unneeded tags, among other things. It will also optimize the structure of your database with a single click.
WordPress database space is consumed by post revisions. Some users believe that database queries performed by plugins may be harmed by changes. If the plugin doesn’t specify exclude post revisions, it may cause your site to load slowly by looking through them.
The amount of revisions WordPress keeps for each article can be simply limited. Just paste this code into your wp-config.php file.
define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4 );
With this code, WordPress will only save the last four versions of each post or page, and earlier revisions will be immediately deleted.
If you’re writing high-quality material for your WordPress blog, it’ll almost certainly be stolen sooner or later. When other websites offer your photographs directly from their URLs on your website rather than uploading them to their own servers, this happens. In effect, they’re grabbing your web hosting bandwidth while leaving you with no traffic.
Lazy loading can help your site if you have a lot of images, several video embeds, and photo galleries in your blog entries. Lazy loading downloads only the photos and videos that will be viewable on the user’s screen, rather than all of them at once. All other photos and video embeds are replaced with a placeholder image.
A WordPress firewall plugin can help you protect your site from brute force attacks, hacking attempts, and viruses. On the other hand, not all firewall plugins are made equal. Because some of them run on your website, attackers can already get to your web server before being banned. This is still secure, but not optimal in terms of performance.
If you’re transitioning your site to HTTPS/SSL, you’re likely to get mixed content issues. Installing a plugin like Really Simple SSL is the simplest method to fix this. The issue is that these plugins first grab all URLs and then convert them to HTTPS before sending them to users’ browsers.
The PHP programming language is used to create WordPress. It’s a server-side language, meaning it’s installed and executed on your hosting server. All good WordPress hosting companies employ the most stable PHP version on their servers.
It’s possible, though, that your hosting provider is using an older PHP version. PHP 7 is two times faster than the previous versions. This is a significant performance increase that your website should take advantage of.
Try out some of these strategies. Remember to test the speed of your website before and after you follow these recommended practices. You’ll be shocked how much these adjustments improve WordPress performance. You should take having a high-performing WordPress site very seriously. Hopefully, the suggestions above will assist you in optimizing your current site so that it loads quickly and gives the greatest user experience possible. Or you can also hire our premium quality WordPress speed optimization service that can optimize your website’s performance without any hassle.
Khaled Khan is a WordPress developer who has been working in the industry for over six years now. He's currently employed as a Senior Engineer at Sizmic Labs, where he helps build a WordPress community of both developers and site owners. When Khaled isn't busy with work you can find him watching survival shows (the crazier ones are always better) cooking up something new in his kitchen -- or out exploring new places to eat in and around Hyderabad.
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