It’s a well-known fact that website users have no patience for slow-loading sites. If a website takes more than 2 seconds to load, most visitors will abandon your site. Consequently, you will lose potential business.
So, it goes without saying that you want the fastest loading WordPress site possible. Fortunately for you, we can tell you exactly how to make that happen. Read on to learn more.
Tactics for Speeding Up Your WordPress Site
Choose a Good Host
When selecting a web host for your WordPress site, we recommend selecting a host specializing in WordPress hosting. The benefit of this is that they will have servers that are optimized for WordPress. Additionally, they will likely offer WordPress-specific features and security options. Furthermore, their support staff will be knowledgeable about WordPress, so they can help you solve most problems.
In addition to being designed to cater to WordPress sites, the best provider for hosting WordPress sites will offer 99.9% uptime and a choice of data centers. By allowing you to choose your data center, you can select the closest one to your clients. The closer your clients are to your server, the faster your site will load.
Install a WP Caching Plugin
WordPress websites are built using dynamic web pages. This means that each time a person loads a post or page on your website, it’s built anew. To construct your posts and pages, WordPress has to run a process to pull the necessary information, piece it together, and then display it to each and every user. This involves many steps and can cause your site to slow down, especially if multiple people are looking at your website at the same time. This is why it’s recommended that you install a WP caching plugin.
A caching plugin minimizes the load on your hosting servers, so your site can run between 2 and 5 times faster. It works by making a copy of your page after the first load. It then serves this copy to every subsequent user. As a result, WordPress doesn’t have to rebuild your web pages each time someone visits.
Reduce the Size of Your Images
According to researchers, colored visuals make people 80% more likely to read your content. However, if you don’t optimize your images, they may slow down your website. Therefore, before you upload any images to your site, you should reduce the size of your images, so they’re web compatible. There are a variety of ways to reduce the size of your images, but the easiest way is to use a plugin such as Optimole, EWWW Image Optimizer, or WP Smush.
Use a Lightweight Theme
The more elements a theme has, the heavier it is. The more weight a theme carries, the slower your web page will load. For this reason, you need to be frugal when selecting a theme. Avoid any themes that have elements you don’t need. You could also choose a theme that allows you to disable the components you don’t need.
For example, some features that weigh a theme down include Awesome Icons, sliders, videos, Google Fonts, galleries, and parallax scripts.
Clean Up Your Database
If left unchecked, a WordPress database will accumulate clutter which can slow down your site. For instance, if you have a post of 100KB and you perform three revisions on it, you will be taking up 300KB of space in your database. This is why you need to perform regular cleanups.
We don’t recommend that you clean up your database manually. Instead, we suggest that you install a plugin such as WP-Sweep or Advanced Database Cleaner. These plugins will go through your database and rid it of spam comments, old revisions, and other clutter.
Minimize JS, CSS, and HTML Files
JS, CSS, and HTML files can build up, causing your WordPress site to run slowly. To fix this, you’ll need to reduce their code.
The easiest way to minimize these file types is to use a plugin such as Autoptimize, WP Rocket, or CSS Compressor. These plugins will reduce the file size of the source code files and remove unnecessary line breaks, characters, comments, and spaces.
