How To Increase Your WordPress Website Performance and Speed It Up? Of course, you are. If you want your website to perform better on Google rankings, you would surely look for ways to increase your WordPress website performance and speed it up.
Having better WordPress performance improves your position in the SERPs, which has to be your target if you want your WordPress site to do well.
Fortunately, there are a variety of tricks that you can use to increase your WordPress website performance and speed it up . We have tried to track these techniques down, and list them here for your convenience. So, no use wasting time – let’s take a look at the ten techniques that you can use to speed up the performance of your WordPress site.
Contents
- 1. Opting for Quality Web Host: Choose A Fast Web Host
- 2. Database of Your WordPress Site: Optimization is Key
- 3. Avail the Use of a CDN
- 4. Use of Plugins: Be Smart
- 5. Make Your Images Load Faster
- 6. Choosing Theme: Prioritize on Lightweight Themes
- 7. Allow Caching
- 8. WordPress and PHP: Use Regular Updates
- 9. Be Efficient When It Comes to Static Files
- 10. Streamlining HTTP Requests
1. Opting for Quality Web Host: Choose A Fast Web Host
How do people get to see your website? If someone is trying to visit your website, a request is sent from their browser to your server so that your website is displayed in the browser.
The time required here is crucial to improve the visitor experience. If it takes too much time for the server to respond, the visitor has to wait for a long time as well.
And it doesn’t matter if your website is very fast and efficient – your web server decides whether your visitor is getting to experience your page real smooth or in a very slow manner.
So, now you know how important it is to choose a quality host. Therefore, before you choose one, you need to decide what kind of quality you are looking for in your web host.
If you are okay with a comparatively slow web host performance or not will determine the selection procedure you need to go through in determining your web host.
Obviously, for specialized and sincere WordPress hosting, you’ll need to spend more bucks. The more you spend, the higher your speed – there is no getting around it.
It’s essential to understand what significance your website speed holds for you. You’ve been looking up ways to improve speed for your WordPress site, so surely you are not content with the speed the way it is. So, in that case, choosing a top-notch web host will certainly help you with your problem.
2. Database of Your WordPress Site: Optimization is Key
The WordPress application that you use keeps all data related to your website in the background. In the database, all the content of your website such as posts, pages, comments, settings, etc. is stored. And this is the database that crucially comes into play when someone visits your website.
If someone visits your site, the visitor is viewing a page or post that is essentially retrieved data from the database. The established page and post are just displayed as excerpts from the database.
However, all the actions that are done by the users – such as commenting, purchasing, etc. – give birth to data generation. The revisions you make to your posts are also saved automatically by WordPress.
The time of request and subsequent response between the database and your site increases generally for two reasons:
- The growth of your database means that the execution of the queries made by a visitor will take more time to perform.
- The cycles of entry and removal of data from your site can lead to fragmentation of your database – which means your database will be divided into distinct parts and stored in the system.
Thus, it’s a no-brainer to remove unnecessary data from your website. If you remove data that your website does not need, you make sure that the execution of queries made is performed faster, as well as the prevention of fragmented database takes place.
Optimizing your database will certainly help with the speed of your WordPress site.
3. Avail the Use of a CDN
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It’s made up of a group of servers that are placed at locations throughout the world, catering to your strategy. As the download time of a resource is dependent on the physical distance between the client and the server, a CDN tries to create an advantage by setting locations.
According to an analysis by HTTP Archive, a page on a generic WordPress site sizes up to around 2.3 MB. And to this page weight, images, fonts, scripts, and stylesheets contribute significantly (up to around 1.85 MB).
So, the idea of CDN is to store the resources around the world, so that when a visitor tries to load them, they can be anywhere around the globe and avail themselves of the advantage of the nearest server – which reduces the load time significantly. This is why using a CDN can be a game-changer for your site as well.
4. Use of Plugins: Be Smart
Plugins are the basis on which the ongoing growth of WordPress is reliant. The functionality of WordPress is taken to new heights with the development and maintenance of plugins – you enter a whole new field of dimensions with WordPress plugins.
However, you should not get too excited and add plugins for every single task that your website has to perform. It’s better to be selective when you’re adding plugins to your website. Keep in mind that the more plugins you add, the more complex your website becomes.
It’s also a good idea to reassess the plugins of your website regularly to keep things in check. Removing the plugins that are not necessary is a great way to improve the speed of your WordPress site.
5. Make Your Images Load Faster
As stated before, images take up a major amount of your website size (more than half) and thus contribute to a similar amount of the load time. Of course, images are a crucial part of your website, and you can’t just discard them for your website’s sake.
But what you can do is optimize images so that they load faster and do not lead to slow loading of your web page.
So, for making sure that your images are not slowing you down, it’s best to police some aspects of the images that you are using on your website:
- Correct size
- Appropriate image type
- Optimization of image
Selecting the correct size of the photo, determining the fitting type of image (PNG, JPG, SVG, etc.), and optimization of images are ways that can help your images load faster, which will subsequentially lead to a faster website overall. So, don’t forget to spend time on the images on your WordPress website.
6. Choosing Theme: Prioritize on Lightweight Themes
Choosing a theme is another place where you can look to make changes to increase your WordPress website performance and speed it up for your website. The theme you select for your WordPress site is related highly to the speed of your page.
It’s crucial to select a theme that is lightweight and flexible – so that the site loads quickly, as well as stays open to customization.
In general, the trick is to choose a lightweight theme that is accompanied by basic features, suited to your requirements. Keeping it simple will make your website run smoothly – that is the key here. No need to give in to the urge of going overboard, it will not matter how intricate the theme of your website is if it loads slowly.
Efficiency should be your number one priority if you are looking to choose themes for your WordPress site.
7. Allow Caching
With caching, a part of your web page is stored temporarily in a location so that your page can be quickly displayed to the visitors, which helps you save server bandwidth and decrease the loading time of pages. So, enabling caching is a no-brainer. For allowing caching in your website, you can simply use WordPress plugins.
You must keep certain things in mind when you are selecting a caching plugin for your website. The plugin must be easy to set up.
It should also provide performance improvement, as well as come with simple settings. Look for special features in the advanced settings to get the best result. Caching makes your website faster, so you should look into it.
8. WordPress and PHP: Use Regular Updates
While it may sound very straightforward, a lot of websites make the mistake of not updating their WordPress, plugins, and PHP to the latest versions.
One thing you must keep in mind is that these are software – and thus they have to undergo updates for constant and gradual improvement. There is no final version or product for software – there is always a better version.
With that in mind, to avail new features, security patches, performance improvements, and bug fixes – you must make sure that you update your WordPress, plugins, and PHP regularly. The additional improvements will make your website faster – and not updating your website will be a very basic mistake to do.
An additional note: make sure you back up the current version of your WordPress site before you go for an update.
9. Be Efficient When It Comes to Static Files
We have already discussed how stylesheets and scripts contribute largely to the payload of your web page. As these are static files that take up a significant amount of space, dealing with them efficiently is the key to getting your website up to speed.
So, how do you do it? You can use various techniques and tricks to manage your static files efficiently. For example, minifying your stylesheets and scripts will decrease the size of your resources. For that to take place, you need to remove the parts of a file that are unnecessary for execution. These parts are made up of whitespaces, comments, etc.
To perform the minification process, you can take the help of service or else use an appropriate plugin as well.
Another step that you can use is asynchronously loading a number of your stylesheets and scripts. With this step, you get rid of the loading of unnecessary resources that stop the loading of the page. Enabling GZIP compression is another way of making your resources compressed.
In this technique, the server sends compressed files to the browser. Then, they are unzipped upon download. With these steps, you will be able to become efficient with your static files, leading to better performance in terms of speed for your WordPress site.
10. Streamlining HTTP Requests
Sending payload to the customer is another thing that needs some focus. A lot of problems that are detected by performance assessment tools are connected to HTTP requests.
The number of HTTP requests your web page possesses, the number of redirects that the requests have, and the number of DNS lookups that the browser requires to download resources is some of the metrics that are used to make such assessments. And reducing the number of HTTP requests is key.
To decrease the number of HTTP requests, you can use several techniques. Combining similar files is an excellent way to reduce the number of HTTP requests. How do you do that? Well, using just one CSS stylesheet for your entire website can be an example.
Combining the custom scripts into a single file is something you can do as well.
Minimizing the number of DNS lookups is another way that you can optimize your HTTP requests in. On each occasion that the browser meets a resource with a new domain name, a DNS lookup becomes necessary to be performed so that the IP address can be found.
To avoid that, using a CDN to serve the static files (as stated above) is a great idea. The number of redirects for static resources should be something that you should look into.
When the HTTP requests decrease, the loading time for your web page reduces as well. So, you get better performance in terms of speed from your website. So, streamlining HTTP requests is a must if you want to get your WordPress site up to speed.
See also:
Best Way To Add Lazy Links in WordPress
How to Clear WordPress Cache (Top 10 Most Effective Ways)?
10 Best WordPress Plugins for All Websites
Conclusion
Nobody likes to click a page and then sit impatiently as the website refreshes. And you certainly don’t want your WordPress site to be that slow. We believe that our list of techniques will help you improve the speed of your WordPress site. All the best!
