Website speed optimization on WordPress

A slow-loading website can be incredibly frustrating for website owners and visitors alike. It is also one of the most common complaints regarding WordPress websites. You can take some simple steps in the direction of website speed optimization to make your WordPress site faster and optimize its load time.

Upgrade Your Hosting

Remember, the first determinant of your website speed is the limits of the website hosting you are using. WordPress is heavier than custom-coded websites. The resource-intensive platform requires a stable hosting provider with exceptional specs to offer top-notch performance.

Consider upgrading your hosting provider today if you use a sophisticated WordPress theme or many plugins simultaneously. Similarly, you may upgrade from a shared hosting package to a VPS or Dedicated hosting package to enjoy a better hosting environment suited for top-website performance.

Here is how poor hosting affects your site loading time.

• Insufficient hardware resources on the hosting server, such as CPU, memory, or storage, can cause a website to load slowly.
• High traffic on the hosting server can lead to resource contention and slow down website loading times.
• Incorrectly configured server settings or software can cause a website to load slowly.
• Serving large, uncompressed files or using many large, uncompressed images can also slow down loading times.

Theme Selection

Remember, developers create each WordPress theme differently. Therefore, some are more lightweight and cleanly coded, ensuring faster performance than others. Similarly, you must select a theme suited to your hosting provider.

For example, if you use shared hosting, prefer a one-page theme or a minimalist design with fewer design elements than intensive themes. This way, you will have a better chance of having faster website performance.

Some things you should look at when choosing a theme are

• Page load time: A theme with a fast page load time will ensure your website loads quickly for visitors, improving the overall user experience.
• Code efficiency: Go with a theme with well-written, efficient code since this contributes to a faster page load time.
• Minimalistic design: Consider something with a minimalistic design rather than many unnecessary elements, as this can also help improve the speed of your website.
• Optimized images: A theme that is easy to work with optimized images, rather than large, unoptimized images, will have a positive effect on the speed of your website.

Image Size Reduction

Larger images have larger file sizes. If most of the images on the website are very large, they may take considerable time to load. Try reducing their file sizes to ensure faster performance. You may use plugins like WP Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer to do it directly on the website.

Alternatively, you may manually upload lighter versions of those images. Another method is to activate lazy loading through any plugin. It allows only the images in the view to be loaded, reducing the overall website load time considerably.

Minification

You may minify your JS and CSS files to remove extra lines of coding. With less code to interpret, the browser can display the webpage faster than before. There is a plugin named Autoptimize that can automatically perform this task for you. However, select the suitable options because improper combinations may cause your site to break down.

Minification can help achieve the following:

• It removes unnecessary characters from the code, such as whitespace, new lines, and comments, reducing the overall size of the file.
• Smaller files take less time to download, reducing the time a user needs to wait for the file to be downloaded.
• Smaller files also mean fewer data needs to be transferred, meaning fewer requests are made to the server, resulting in faster loading times.
• Minification also reduces the amount of code that needs to be parsed by the browser, improving load times.

Caching

By creating a cache version of the website pages, you can considerably reduce the time required for loading. Also, prefetching can help the user navigate faster between different website pages. Caching has one drawback: space requirements. The cached pages are stored on your server, which may take considerable space if you have a large website. Take a look at some WordPress caching plugins like WP Rocket.

Deactivate Plugins

Deactivating plugins is an easy way to improve the speed of a website by reducing the number of resources used. Plugins often add functionality, but not all are essential; therefore, it is vital to consider any plugin’s necessity before installing it on a site.

Once installed, each plugin should be reviewed periodically to determine whether it benefits the website’s performance. If any unnecessary plugins are slowing down the site, they should be deactivated or removed from the server altogether.

Conclusion

A website’s speed and performance are crucial in determining its success. Given the prominence of WordPress as a platform, many site owners often look for ways to fine-tune their WordPress websites to achieve optimal performance. The good news is that enhancing your WordPress site’s speed doesn’t necessarily require complex technical skills; it often comes down to implementing several straightforward measures.

If you’re tired of the slow speed of your website, don’t wait any longer – try Above Bits LLC and get your site pumping with speed.