How crucial is a web page speed is a fact no one can keep unnoticed. It is the primary facet that determines the Google ranking factor of your website on desktop or mobile and strongly impacts the user experience.
WordPress websites with annoying slow speeds have turned out to be a common issue so far. The sluggish speed could often be a result of bandwidth throttling, network congestion, content filtering, data discrimination, etc. Search engines (e.g. Google) generally rank the websites based on faster loading times. So, if you want to scale up at SERPs, adhering to a faster-loading WordPress website should be one of your priorities.
So what could be the ways through which you can get your WordPress websites rolling with lightning-fast speed? Well, there are various methods and techniques which may get the job done. Let’s read on further to discover solutions to your WordPress website speed issues.
Test your website speed
Analysis of the current load time for your website is important. However, the speed may vary from page to page, depending on different factors such as:
- Size of the page
- Number of requests generated
- Type of content being hosted
- Caching
Picking a suitable web hosting provider
The major factor impacting a website’s speed is the hosting of your WordPress website. In such scenarios, shared hosting environments are not a success. They fail to load web pages quickly during peak traffic hours as common server space is being shared with numerous other websites. Dedicated cloud servers could save you from getting trapped in a shared hosting environment.
Cleaning up the WordPress database
Cleaning up unwanted files is always a good idea when a need to increase the website speed arises. Deleting unrequired data from your database lightens the load, minimizing the size of your backup. Another vital aspect one must never miss out on is to eliminate anything that appears spam, old content drafts, even fake users. Following the aforementioned will surely assist in reducing the size of your databases and web files, eventually pacing up to your WordPress website.
Removal of unused plugins
Except for an absolutely new WordPress website, you might have installed a bunch of plugins that have stood unused for a long time.Also, you can hire a WordPress development company to get the best solution. Out of those, there could be a few that may influence page speed. Removing such plugins helps in the long run.
Installing caching plugin
Caching stores files temporarily for a smooth experience for visitors. In the case of WordPress websites, the pages must interact with a database to be “built” with PHP before being delivered. Reducing the time this process takes by activating caching helps increase speed and a seamless user experience.
- Browser caching saves ‘common’ files on the users’ hard drive to avoid repeated downloads on next visits.
- Server caching saves the‘ static’ version of the page on a server to skip rebuilding on every new request.
Reducing HTTP requests
As per a survey by Yahoo, approximately 80% of the loading time of a web page is consumed in downloading images, scripts, stylesheets, etc. These actions require an HTTP request for each particular element.
Minimizing the number of requests your WordPress website currently makes, increases its speed to a large extent, by “minifying” and combining your files. This reduces the size of each file and a total number of files. the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files dictate your site’s appearance and add to the number of requests your site makes each time a user visits it.
Employing asynchronous loading for CSS & JavaScript files
CSS and JavaScript could load in two different manners: Synchronously and Asynchronously. Combining these files could help in increasing the WordPress website speed depending on the server setup. The scripts load one at a time in a synchronous manner. Using the asynchronous method can speed up your pages making them move from top to bottom while loading.
Deactivating pingbacks and trackbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks are the key components of a WordPress website alerting you about links received on the pages. These features also put an extra burden on your server resources generating requests back and forth from WordPress.
Using a CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Networks) maintains a copy of your website in different data centers located at various places. One can find numerous CDN, able to assist in reducing the site-loading speed for visitors from different locations or countries. CDN plays a primary role in serving the web page to a visitor from the nearest available location with increased speed.
Conclusion
The biggest benefit of reducing your WordPress website’s loading time is that it strongly helps in improving the experience of your visitors by increasing the website speed whether they are using Laptops, Tabs, or mobile devices. Furthermore, it confers a great advantage of improving your rankings in the SERPs.
