How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website
Web Pages loading time is very important part for user satisfaction and search engine ranking. Now, mobile usage is rapidly growing and visitors accessing your website via mobile phones and tablets. Your website can be slow if you have potential visitors. If your website is slower than normal website, visitors aren’t interest your website. Speed is the killing factor of the website. The more loading time, the less visitors. The fast loading time, the more visitors. You must know the flow of website speed is associate with visitors.
There are many ways to optimize website speed and high search engine ranking. Almost 25% of the websites in the world are built with WordPress CMS and it is easy to setup, numerous plugins, etc. If you want to know about WordPress CMS, read this article : 6 Reasons Why Your Business Website Should Switch to WordPress. So, I’m not tell you about WordPress CMS description and usage. In this article, I will show you how to make your WordPress site to get bullet speed. :D
1.Test Your Website Speed
It is a good idea to test your website before making any changes. There are many page speed test tools and services available over the internet. I will list 3 most popular tools.
Most of features are similar and they give you a report that includes scores, suggestions, page analysis data. Carefully read fully description of report and make improvement for your website.
2. Image Compression
Image compression makes your website faster and save bandwidth. This method is minimizing the size of graphic files without losing the quality of image. There are many image compression tools for desktop, mobile and online services, I will only point you to use WordPress image compression plugins. Try the following plugins.
You can use one of these and don’t use multiple image compression plugins. After installing and activation process completed, just optimize all images files in your media library.
3. Check your Plugins
Although WordPress plugins provide many functional to your website, you should avoid using too much many plugins. For example, if you use social media sharing plugin, you should use only one social media sharing plugin. Don’t use same functional multiple plugins. It will cause your website performance to down. So, just deactivate, uninstall and delete from your plugins. You can also check with P3 (Plugins Performance Profiler) plugin which measures your site’s load time by plugin impact. So, you can know which plugins make your site to slow. See the following picture.
4. Caching
Speed up your WordPress site by using caching plugins. These caching plugin generates static HTML files that are showed to visitors. There are many caching plugins for WordPress, and their functions are similar to each others. You should avoid using multiple caching plugins. Caching method can handle higher volume of traffic for your website. Now, I will list top 3 WordPress caching plugins.
If you don’t want to pay charges for these caching plugins, try W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. WP Rocket never comes with free service.
5. Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
If your website gets lot of traffic, you should use CDN service not only to improve website performance but also to protect DDOS attack. CDN delivers your website to the visitors based on the geographic location. Using CDN, your website performance will speed up to 60%. The following are popular CDN providers.
6. Minifying HTML, CSS and JS
Striping white-space from HTML, CSS and JavaScript is called minification. These minification plugins combine files and reduce the number of requests to server so that your website will more faster and quick loading time. There are many minification WordPress plugins available on the WordPress plugin directory and you can use any plugins. Try the following plugins.
7. Choosing a right theme
It is also an important part for your website speed. Some of themes are light weight but some are heavy. Some of themes come with additional plugins that provide functional part of your website such as WooCommerce, widgets and others. If you don’t use those function, you should disable those plugins. Some of great themes can reduce the need of plugins. So, if you are finding a right theme, avoid too much plugins needed theme.
8. Finding Hosting
Website speed depends on the hosting server. If you are only run WordPress website, I recommend you to use managed WordPress hosting. Unlike shared hosting, hosting provider optimizes the best performance for WordPress website that includes automatic update, daily backups, built-in catching and more. If you want to host only on Managed WordPress Hosting, the following is the best options for your WordPress website.
If you don’t want to host on managed WordPress hosting, you can also try with shared hosting, or VPS. If you are finding affordable price with web hosting , please read an article I written : 5 Web Hosting Options for Your Startup Website.
Conclusion
If you are successfully finished above the mentioned steps, check your website with Google PageSpeed, GTmetrix and pingdom. You will see incredible improvement of your website. Enjoy your WordPress website with bullet speed. Cheers……. :D
