We now live on a digital planet, where speed and efficiency are everything. If your website takes longer than it should load, your traffic and bottom line are almost certainly hurt. When developers and business owners realize this, they often wonder how to speed up WordPress sites. The information below will help you realize why it's essential for websites to load quickly, and you'll also learn a few tips for making your WordPress site load faster.
WordPress Website Speed
WordPress is a sophisticated content production platform that has swept the globe. Over 75 million websites have been created so far using the platform. You'll need plugins, themes, and other tools to make things appear beautiful and let your branding shine through, just like any other website construction tool. Unfortunately, these technologies may slow things down regardless of your content management system, and these technologies may slow things down.
Fortunately, there are methods for increasing the speed of your website. You may immediately accelerate things by properly organizing your themes, images, plugins, and other assets. Just bear in mind that before a consumer can enjoy the entire experience of your website, every content management system must load all associated pieces, whether visible on the page or in the background.
You may be wondering what role loading speeds play in whether or not visitors love your website at this stage. Unfortunately, if your site takes an excessive amount of time, they may not be able to enjoy anything at all.
Also Read: Five Best WooCommerce WordPress Themes in 2022
What is the Importance of Website Speed?
The classic shrieking of a dial-up modem warning that your website will soon load is passed. Consumers nowadays expect online websites to load quickly. 40% said they would quit a website if it took more than three seconds to load.
Having a fast WordPress site is the greatest thing you can do for your company. You will surely lose money and traffic if you do not do this. This is since internet customers are a little impatient. Indeed, more than half of all mobile users confess to quitting a website due to its sluggish loading time. It's also worth mentioning that websites with loading durations of 1-2 seconds have roughly three times the conversion rate of those with loading periods of 5-10 seconds.
If your websites have terrible loading times, prospective customers may never discover you. Google just revealed that from July 2018, page speed would be a ranking factor in mobile searches. This implies that a sluggish site will harm your SEO ranking. There has never been a better moment to speed up WordPress blogs.
Why is Website Speed too Important for Mobile Users?
While mobile devices and mobile usage prevalence is nothing new, you may be surprised to learn that speed plays a significant factor in how Google indexes mobile searches. You may acquire a good rating even if your site is slightly sluggish and closely related to specific search phrases. Google, on the other hand, prioritizes speedier mobile pages.
One-fifth of Americans consider themselves mobile-only internet users. If you are worried about the loading speeds of your mobile site, you should consider choosing a current WordPress theme and plugins that are based on the responsive design principle.
How To Speed Up Page Loading Times
There are many essential methods you may take on your own to help these tools create a speedy WordPress site. One of the most basic methods is to allow your site to be cached. Here are a few more pointers.
➣ Perform a Site Speed Analysis
The next stage in optimizing site speed is understanding how quickly your page loads. You should measure site performance if you install a plugin or make another change to your site and want to see how it affects load times.
Use a tool like WP Engine to assess load performance and get WordPress-specific site speed advice on making your site operate faster. After you enter your website URL, you'll get an email with a personalized analysis of how quickly your site loads and precise suggestions to speed it up.
➣ Deactivate Unused Plugins and Themes
Aside from constantly keeping your plugins and themes up to date, eliminating unneeded ones is the next step toward a faster site. Unused plugins and themes pose security risks, but they may also degrade WordPress site speed.
Delete unused plugins; to do so, you must first deactivate them. Then go to your inactive plugins list and eliminate those you don't need.
To delete unwanted themes, simply go to Appearance > Themes and delete the themes no longer in use.
Also Read: Top 10 Ways to Increase Organic Website Traffic 2022
➣ Organize Your Media Library
You may begin to gather photographs that are no longer in use over time. Remove unneeded media to save up space.
To rid of unwanted media manually, you may use a plugin like Media Cleaner or do it manually. To manually remove useless media files, go to Add Media -> Media Library -> Unattached and then delete the files that are no longer in use.
➣ Purge Your WordPress Database
If you don't clean up your WordPress database, it will start to get cluttered over time if you don't. This extra stuff that isn't needed can slow down your site. But if you clean up your database often, you can reduce its size and make it load faster.
For example, post revisions can take up a lot of space that doesn't need to be there. If you have a post that takes up 100KB of space and you make five changes, you've wasted about 500KB of space.
You can manually clean up your database with phpMyAdmin, but it can be hard and even dangerous if you are not aware of what you are doing.
If you aren't very good with computers, installing a plugin is the safest way to do this. WP-Sweep and Advanced Database Cleaner are good choices for sweeping through your database and getting rid of old revisions, spam comments, MySQL queries, and more.
➣ Delete Render-Blocking Javascript and CSS
If you have been running page test tools to check the performance of your website, you may have come across this tip, which might be confusing. You will probably see many JavaScript files (.js files) loading before your "start render" line if you check your page's waterfall view using webpagetest.org or Pingdom. The term for this is "render-blocking JavaScript."
JavaScript's primary purpose is to execute an action on a web page, such as a popup or spinning pictures in a slider. These actions do not need to be loaded until your site's content, and styles are loaded. So when these tools say "Defer JavaScript Parsing," they mean "load this thing later in your page instead of at the top." WP Critical CSS is one of the plugins that may assist you in delaying the execution of this JavaScript.
➣ Minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript
CSS, HTML, and other source code files may accumulate over time, making your site perform like molasses. Consider minifying your website's code to improve its performance.
The backend of your site will be tuned to be a lean, mean machine thanks to minification. This approach reduces the size of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files by removing extraneous characters such as spaces, line breaks, and comments. Consequently, the quantity of data transmission needed is decreased, allowing files to execute faster and web pages to load faster. A lot of plugins have been created to minify code. One of the most popular free plugins for this purpose is Autoptimize. You might also use the paid WP Rocket plugin, which aids in site optimization and minification. CSS Compressor is another helpful tool for reducing CSS code complexity.
➣ Image Optimization
Images are essential for keeping site visitors interested. While your site may have a lot of lovely pictures, it is a good idea to optimize these photos for quick page load speeds. You may optimize your photographs in various ways, including compressing them, adding alt language and titles, and building an image sitemap. Some best image optimization plugins are Smush, Imagify, Compress JPEG & PNG Images, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, reSmush, etc.
➣ Reduce Redirects & Post Revisions
Although redirects have many purposes, excessive redirects such as 301 redirects and redirect chains may cause significant delays. It is better to keep your servers' extra information requests to a minimum.
Post revision preserves every content change you make indefinitely, slowing down your site. You may restrict the number of oscillations per post to speed up your site.
To restrict the number of post modifications, enter the wp-config.php file and add the following line of code:
define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4 );
In this situation, the number signifies four, indicating that each post will have four revisions. By adjusting the value to 0 or false, you may alter this number or even turn off revisions.
➣ Update to The recent Version of PHP
The newest version of PHP may significantly improve the performance of your website. Use WP Engine's PHP Compatibility Checker plugin to see whether your site is ready to upgrade to the newest PHP environment.
➣ Pick a Fast, Lightweight Theme
Some WordPress themes are better than others. A beautiful UI design is useless if your site does not load quickly.
Instead of going with a feature-rich theme that requires a lot of code to be loaded every time someone visits your site, go with a theme that includes the fundamental essentials. Check out this article if you are creating an eCommerce WordPress website, Five Best WooCommerce WordPress Themes in 2022.
➣ Choose a CDN
Your content should be served lightning quickly regardless of the user's location. However, this is not always possible unless your website is hosted on a network that includes data centers in other countries. Content distribution might be slowed by distance, where a content delivery network (CDN) comes in useful.
Because a CDN is installed, your website will utilize an optimized server nearest to your site visitor, and your site page load times will be quicker. Users will get static material and files from the data center, which will be sent to them depending on their location. Because the static content is already ready to send, instead of requesting a large amount of HTTP at once, this may minimize external HTTP requests.
The popularity and demands of your site will determine which CDN you should choose. MaxCDN, Cloudflare, and CacheFly are some WordPress CDN options.
Conclusion
The most significant benefit of reducing your websites loading time will significantly improve your visitors' experience. Whether they utilize mobile devices or PCs, the situation is the same. It will also help you rank higher in the search engines. After all, lower bandwidth utilization on your hosting server and better site loading speeds on the client-side can only help you in the long term.