Pratik Bhatt

Imagine you’re surfing one of your most liked sites and suddenly experience it getting slowed down? How would you feel about it? Very irritating right. Well, this can be a serious problem too especially for development companies as this can turn off customer engagement. You want to know what can be the solution to this as the fast loading pages can improve user experience by increasing your page views and helping with WordPress SEO either.

Many of us have a question like why does speeding up the page is so crucial? Well, it has a great impact on your SEO as google intentionally hustle on the specifics for some researches and one thing is for sure that better speed leads to a higher ranking in the eyes of Google. In this article, we are going to share how you can use some tips and tricks to boost up your WordPress speed and performance. Let’s begin.

How to check your Website speed?

It is always misunderstood by beginners by thinking that their website is just Ok as they don’t experience any slow movement on their computer. This can be a big mistake to ignore. As you frequently visit your website, browsers like Google Chrome stores your website in the cache and prefetch it automatically as soon as you start typing an address; it will load your website instantly.

For some normal users who visit your website for the first time, they may not experience it as users from different geographical locations have a totally different experience. For this purpose, we are crowded with tons of multiple speed tools to check your website speed. One of the most recommended is the Page Speed Test tool which is a free source and allows to identify bugs if any which are interrupting your website. Generally, a good website page load time is estimated under 2 seconds to retain constant customer engagement.

What is it Important to Speed Up your Website?

Most of the technical jargon relayed to the slow working website is difficult to understand by the beginners. So, learning what slows down your website is the key factor in improving by making smarter long-term decisions. The basic causes which are labeled for a slow WordPress website are the web hosting service provider which are not configured properly to disturb your website speed.

Along with this, if your WordPress site is not serving cached pages then there are typical changes that will overload your server which will slow or crash your site. A poorly coded plugin can also hurt your site speed along with the external scripts like ads, front loaders and much more have a huge impact on your site performance.

Steps to improve your Site speed

• Opt for good Web-Hosting service provider

A good WordPress hosting service plays a crucial role in boosting up your website performance. For instance, Bluehost and Siteground are the names that take some extra measures to optimize your website speed. On the other side, shared hosting allows you to share server resources with multiple customers which illustrates that if your neighboring website gets more traffic then it can impact the entire server performance which will eventually slow down your site as well.

However, by using the managed WordPress hosting service you can get the most optimized server configurations for running your WordPress site as it offers automatic backups, WordPress updates, and many more advanced security configurations in order to your site.

• Plugin for WordPress Cache

We are aware how the pages are dynamic which means they can be built on the fleeing every time anyone visits a post or page on your site. WordPress has to run a process for finding the required information to build your pages and then display them to the users. This involves a lot more steps which can really slow down your site if you have multiple people visiting your website at one time. For this, it is better recommended to use a caching plugin by WordPress as caching can make your site faster up to 5x times.

This reduces the work of going through the whole page generation process as the caching plugin puts up the copy of the page after the first load and then serves it to every subsequent user. For instance, if a user visits your site, your server retrieves information from a MySQL database and PHP files. After this, it puts it all together into HTML content, which is meant to be used by the users.

It is a very long process and hence you can skip a lot of it when using caching instead. There are various WordPress caching plugins but we recommend to use either WP Rocket for premium users and WP Super Cache for open-source users.

• Optimize your Site Images for Speed

Images help to bring life to your content by boosting engagement. But if your images are not optimized then they can turn out be a villain in hurting your site. Experts recommend using photo software for optimizing your images from the web before it directly from your phone camera. The photos are in huge file sizes in their original formats, where you can reduce image size up to 5x times based on image size format and the compression.

You may choose from JEPG and PNG which can get your image compresses or uncompressed accordingly. If your photo posses different colors, go for JPEG but for the transparent or simple image, you can choose PNG. As we can see how the image format can make a huge impact on website performance.

Go for Content Delivery Network

Do you remember we have discussed how different users from various geographical locations experience different loading times on your website? This happens because of the location of your web hosting servers as it can have a huge impact on your site speed. Say, for instance, if your web hosting company has its servers in Europe then the people over their will see faster loading than in India. By using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), it can help to speed up your loading times for all the users across the globe.

Basically, a CDN is a network consisting up of servers all over the world which will store static files to make up your website. These static files include images, CSS and JavaScript which are unchanging ones while the WordPress pages are dynamic. When using a CDN, every time a user visits your website they get served with those static files from whichever server is near to them. Even your own web hosting server is faster than as the CDN is doing a lot more work. It is recommended to use StackPath CDN which works very well with WordPress websites and extensions your current WordPress caching plugins for even faster loading times.

• Decrease External HTTP Requests

Many WordPress plugins and themes try to load all kinds of files from other websites which include scripts, stylesheets, and images from external sources like Google, Facebook, analytics service and much more. We have mentioned a list from which you can utilize as many of these files are optimized so they can load quickly as possible and faster than hosting them on your own website.

Always remember that if your plugin is making a lot of requests then it can slow down your website significantly. All of these external HTTP requests can be disabled by scripts and styles by merging them into one file or operating on them individually. You can also try to disable the plugin’s JavaScript and CSS files.

Wrapping Up

We got some of the hacks to implement for boosting website performance and speed but one should always remember that website speed is not only the thing which holds importance. You can disable images altogether and use almost no styling and javascript which are taken into the extreme. This can actually lower your page loading time to 345ms but the ultimate goal of your website is to increase customer engagement. Try to make your website visually appealing in order to make it user-friendly by providing crucial information for your users.

So, just go ahead and try these unique techniques. It is mandatory to test your website speed before and after implementing these best tips and tricks. Be ready to get surprised with these changes as it will definitely boost your WordPress performance.