The Need for Speed 10 Essential WordPress Performance Tips
A fast-loading website with the best user experience increases your page views and also helps WordPress SEO. In this blog, we shall learn about 10+ ultimate ways to speed up your WordPress Website Performance.
Without further ado, let’s hop on to the ways!
Keep Your WordPress Website Updated
Since WordPress is an open-source project, it is maintained and updated all the time. So, should you! Each update comes with a set of new and modern features besides fixing bugs and issues in the website. Also, keep an eye on the WordPress theme and plugins that too have their regular updates.
As a website owner, it is your responsibility to keep the website up to date with all the latest versions- whether it is WordPress, plugins, themes, or others. Doing so brings an improvement in the speed and performance of the website.
Optimize Background Processes
Background Processes are those scheduled tasks that run in the background of the WordPress site. Some of the examples of background tasks running on a WordPress site are:
- WordPress Backup plugin tasks
- WordPress cron jobs for checking updates
- WordPress cron jobs for publishing scheduled posts
- Search engines and crawlers trying to fetch website content.
Even though these cron jobs bring a minimal effect on the WordPress website, it is the backup plugins and excessive crawling running in the background.
Make sure that backup plugins work during the low traffic time, and also adjust the frequency of backups and data needed to back up.
Use Excerpts On Homepage And Archives
In default manner, WordPress shows the entire article content on the homepage and archives. This means that categories, tags, homepage, and other archive pages will load slower.
The second reason that makes showcasing excerpts better is that users do not feel the need to visit the article. This also reduces the page views and the time spent on your website or a specific webpage.
To speed up your page loading time, set your site to display excerpts rather than the full content of the article.
Split Comments Into Pages
Have lots of comments on your blogs? That’s great! It is a greater indicator of an engaged audience. However, the downside is that it increases the loading of the comments and can increase your website speed.
The good news is that WordPress comes with an inbuilt solution for that! You can simply break the comments into pages to reduce the page loading speed.
Use A CDN
Most WordPress users know that different geographical locations result in different speed loading times of the website.
Why?
It is because of the location of the web hosting servers that has an impact on the speed of the website. For instance, if your web hosting servers are from the United States, then the user visiting from the United States will have a faster experience compared to the ones visiting the same website from India.
Using a Content Delivery Network helps to reduce loading times and speed for all your visitors from across the world.
A CDN is a network built of servers from all around the world. Each server stores “static” files that are used to make up for the website. It includes files like CSS, JavaScript, and images rather than your dynamic WordPress website.
Do Not Upload Audio/Video Files Directly To WordPress
Although you can upload your Audio/ Video Files directly to your WordPress website, you should not do that! This will cost you bandwidth; moreover, you may also end up being charged higher fees from your web hosting company or have a shut down of the site altogether even when you took up an unlimited bandwidth plan.
Instead, use audio/ video hosting services like Vimeo, Daily Motion, SoundCloud, YouTube, and others. Let them take care of the hard work and also get bandwidth for your website’s audio and video files.
Simply copy-paste the URL of the video directly into the post and embed it automatically.
Use An Optimized Theme For Speed
When you select the WordPress theme to design your website, you need to make sure that it is optimized. Some of the beautiful and appealing themes might have poor coding and end up being heavy on your WordPress website.
The simple way is to have a simpler theme that does not have complex layouts, flashy animations, or other unnecessary features. You can always get these via the WordPress plugins in case you need them.
Use Faster Plugins
Poorly coded WordPress plugins bring too much load to the WordPress site. If you are confused about the best WordPress plugins to choose, here is a quick list:
- WPForms
- All in One SEO
- Monster Insights
- Shared Counts
- SeedProd
Besides our recommendations, you can run your own tests on plugins and choose the best ones for your WordPress website.
Reduce External HTTP Requests
Many WordPress themes and plugins end up loading a bunch of files from other websites. These include stylesheets, images, and scripts from external sources like Analytics Services, Facebook, Google, and others.
It is alright to use some of them, but you need to optimize them so that the files load as quickly as possible. This will help in increasing the speed of performance of the WordPress website.
In case, your plugins have a lot of requests, then it may end up slowing down the website. Reduce it by reducing the external HTTP requests- disable the scripts or merge them into one file.
Optimize WordPress Database
After being on the WordPress website, you may have a few unnecessary files in your database that you do not need anymore. For improved performance, optimize and get rid of this unnecessary information.
It can be easily managed with WP Sweep Plugin. Clean your WordPress website by deleting the revisions, trashed posts, unused tags, and others. The plugin also helps in optimizing the database structure in a single click.
Final Thoughts
The advantage of lowering the speed time or increasing the website speed is that helps in improving the experience of the visitors. Ensure that you take care of the website for all kinds of devices. Moreover, it also helps in improving SERPs ranking. Above all, reduced bandwidth usage of hosting and quick loading speed benefits the client in the long and short run!
