How to optimize the speed of a WordPress website

Upgrade Your Hosting

Remember, the first determinant of your website speed are 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.

If you are using a sophisticated WordPress theme or many plugins simultaneously, consider upgrading your hosting provider today. 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 also cause a website to load slowly.
• Serving large, uncompressed files or using a lot of large, uncompressed images can also slow down loading times.

Theme Selection

Remember, each WordPress theme has been developed differently. Therefore, some of them are more lightweight and cleanly coded, ensuring faster performance than other counterparts. Similarly, you must select a theme that is suited to your hosting provider.

For example, if you use shared hosting, prefer a one-page theme or a minimalist design with lesser 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 that 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 a lot of 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 lesser code to interpret, the browser can display the webpage faster than before. There is a plugin named Autoptimize that can perform this task for you automatically. However, make sure you select the right 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 amount of 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 to navigate faster between different pages of the website. Caching has one drawback: space requirements. The cached pages are stored on your server, which may take considerable space if you have a very large website.

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 of them are essential; therefore, it is important to consider any plugin’s necessity before installing it on a site.

Additionally, once installed, each plugin should be reviewed periodically to determine whether it is beneficial for the performance of the website. If there are any unnecessary plugins that are slowing down the site, then they should be deactivated or removed from the server altogether.

Conclusion

Improving the performance of your WordPress site can be achieved with some simple steps. By following the advice in this article, you should have a much faster website in no time. Implementing a caching plugin is an easy way to improve your page load speeds, as well as optimizing images and reducing external scripts. Additionally, switching to a faster web host can also make a huge difference in speed.

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