How to Speed Up WordPress Website Load Time
How to speed up WordPress website load time? It is essential to learn for every site owner. Nowadays Google considers website speed as ranking factor. Speed is very important for the user to stay on your website. If a user has to wait for your website to load he/she moves to the other website, which increases bounce rate of the website.
According to the research, longer than 2-second delay considered as the website is slow which results in losing visitors on your website. And your ranking will reduce as now Google include speed in its ranking algorithm.
How to Speed Up WordPress Website Load Time
Many techniques you can use to speed up the WordPress website. Hope the following techniques will help you out.
1. Optimize images
Images usually consume lots of space in a web page. It is a good idea to compress it before uploading, as the large size images make the website slow because it increases the loading time. Reducing image size do not mean you have to compromise the image quality.
Compression can be done by using Photoshop or other software but it will take time. It can also be done by some tools and plugins. There is a platform TinyPNG that provide online services to do the compression.
Image optimization can also be done by quality plugins like WP-Smush plugin which do the process automatically.
Using above mentioned processes increases the website speed and there are many WordPress speed optimizations services you can use to speed up your website.
2. Use GZIP compression
File compression saves lots of space on your computer. Same is with the website you can use GZIP compression.
Websites contain the number of files and it is a good idea to compress these files, so the website works fast.
Either you can use GZIP ninja speed optimization plugin to compress the file on website or you can insert the following code in .htaccess file in the website root directory.
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
# Remove browser bugs
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent
</IfModule>
3. Use caching plugins
WordPress caching plugins are quite useful, as they reduces the load time of the website. The best thing is most of the WordPress plugins are free and user friendly.
WordPress offers many plugins for the solution of caching and the best ones are W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and WP Rocket. These plugins are easy to use and install.
But if you still want to solve the caching problem yourself, here is the way how to do it. All you have to do is edit .htaccess files, it can be opened using FTP client like Core or FileZilla. Open the simple text editor and write a code for which files you want to cache.
## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/pdf “access plus 1 month”
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript “access plus 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access plus 1 month”
ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresDefault “access plus 2 days”
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##
You can edit the expiry time as you like depending on your website.
4. Choosing a better host
Choosing shared host is a good option to start your website but these sever slows down the website when there is high traffic. As shared host provides services to many websites at the same time.
If you want your website to be fast and efficient use dedicated servers. Speed matters on a website and don’t waste time and money in cheap servers.
5. Deactivate hotlinking
What is hotlinking? When other websites link the images in your website from their post which increases the load on your server. This is known as hotlinking.
The problem is another site uses your bandwidth linking to your image instead of using their own image and you get no traffic out of it.
Hotlinking can be stopped, simply add this code to your .htaccess files.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER}
!^http://(www\.)domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp|zip|rar|mp3|flv|swf|xml|php|png|css|pdf)$ — [F]
Replace domain.com with your own domain.
6. Uninstall unwanted plugins
Remove unwanted plugins from your website because it is just a load on your server which increases the load time.
It also increases the backup size which put the load on your server while creating backup files. It is a good idea to delete these unwanted plugins and the ones you can work without.
Just remove the burden from your website.
7. Keep your website up-to-date
Keep your WordPress website up to date, as new features and bug fixes are adding day by day in WordPress. These updates help to improve the speed and load time of your website.
An outdated website is a vulnerability, it not only slows your website but also increases the security issues. Don’t forget to update the other components like themes and plugins of your website, they also play a big role in your site speed.
8. Use a CDN ( Content Delivery Network )
There are many CDN ( Content Delivery Network ) that stores your static file like images, CSS, and javascript to different servers around the globe. It helps the visitors to access the website fast from the nearest possible server.
CDN helps to minimize the load time. The accessing speed differs from country to country as the visitor is far away from the host server. Thanks to the CDN which helps the visitors to access the files faster.
There are many good services like CloudFlare, MaxCDN, and Cloudfront.
9. Use a proper WordPress framework or theme
Use simple and elegant themes for WordPress website. If you use some fancy themes with so many features, elements, and add-on, it will slow down your website speed.
The best approach is to use WordPress default themes. That way your website will be lighter and fast to load.
10. Avoid uploading videos on your website
Uploading a video to your own website is not a big issue but it is not a good idea. While the website is capable of playing and hosting videos, doing it slows your web speed as videos consume lots of space. As the file size increases harder it gets for the server to create back up.
There are many fast video uploading website that is very efficient for hosting and playing videos. If you want to show a video on your website, upload it to YouTube, Dailymotion or Vimeo. Just copy and paste the link from the site where you uploaded your video into your website editor.
Conclusion
Speed is the important part of the website. It affects search rankings, bounce rate, conversions and much more. Try the above-mentioned techniques to speed up your website. Always use fewer plugins on your website it helps in speed optimization.
I hope this will help you but if you still face this problem don’t hesitate to contact fix my site pro for support.
