How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website?

I remember the time when I was willing to wait even a minute for a web page to load, just to view a few images. Those days are gone now. As the internet is getting larger and we have bigger bandwidth connections we tend to want more and we want it faster out of our web-pages. Our attention span has dropped from 12 to 7 seconds over the past 10 years. We also don’t like to wait more than 2 seconds for a website to load. If it takes about 3 seconds, more than 30% of people will just click away. Nobody’s got time to wait that long. We want to see what we want to see and we want to see it instantly. Google also treats website loading speed as an independent ranking factor. That’s because speed is one of the main contributors to a fluid user experience.
I don’t think I have to stress the fact that you have to make your website fast, so let’s get down to how you can do it!
Find the Best Possible Hosting Plan
Every post about optimizing your WordPress site’s speed starts with the advice that you should choose a good hosting plan. That is because you can’t have a fast car with a crappy engine, right? It’s as simple as that. There are plenty of people complaining that their websites are incredibly slow, only to find out that they’re working with a cheap, low quality hosting plan.
You don’t have to bring out the big bucks to have a high speed website. In fact, you can get and awesome hosting plan for about $5 per month, like with HostGator Cloud for example. Even if you are running an eCommerce website, it should be enough or it will require a few dollars more. But remember that a powerful hosting plan is the backbone of your website. Also, if you can, always go with hosting providers that have an SSD infrastructure.
Optimize The Images You Upload
Images sometimes take too much time to load. In fact, they are the heaviest parts of your website, so it’s worth to stick to a few rules.
The first things you should specify, is the maximum image dimensions for every thumbnail. When you upload a 1080p image and the content area of the thumbnail is only 604px, than it will be reduced to that size using CSS. But by specifying the maximum width and height, the image will be pre-resized, which will make it much smaller in size, saving you a lot of valuable bandwidth.
You should also reduce the image sizes, without resizing them. For that, you should either compress them or use Smush.it. It’s a great tool that will help you carve off unnecessary bytes from your image files without changing their look or their visual quality.
Use a Caching Plugin
Caching is a great way to speed up any WordPress website. It makes your website much faster and also reduces the strain it puts on the server it’s hosted on. They cache dynamic and static content, thus increasing your page’s loading times, because there’s a lot less to load. This will improve the user experience and make for a much more efficient website. I recommend using W 3 Total Cache, which does browser caching, page caching, database caching, object caching and so on.
Use a Content Delivery Network
Medium and large websites with plenty of static content perform much better on a content delivery network than on anything else. These networks cache your static content, such as JavaScript, CSS, and images and so on, and saves them on many servers. The content will be displayed from the server that’s closes to the user, cutting some valuable time from the loading times. But it’s worth mentioning that it isn’t always cheap to use content delivery networks. If you find them too expensive, then use Cloudflare, which is a free CDN service provider. It’s also a great place to see what a content delivery network can provide for your website.
Optimize Your Database
An optimized database gives a huge speed bonus to a database driven system like WordPress. Your WordPress MySQL database can be optimized for faster performance, directly from the PHPMyAdmin or by installing a plugin like WP-Optimize. You can do easy bulk operations with these plugins, like deleting every spam comment, auto-saved drafts, trash posts and anything useless that might be slowing your website down.
Conclusion
There are plenty of tweaks you can make to make your WordPress run faster. By executing at least a couple of tips you’ve read here, you’ll definitely have a more optimized website. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading through this article and that we helped you learn something new today!
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