Loading time of web page of any entity on internet matters a lot, the results of the page will vary with a fraction of seconds. It might lose the huge potential business for any entity. For such purpose,  understanding Speed Optimization & Performance of wordpress website is important. 

Why should you understand Speed Optimization & Performance of wordpress website?

  • Speed loading of a website is one of the key factors in the SERP (Search engine results page).
  • Search engines (like Google) rank the websites based on its loading time
  • Studies reveal that site loading in more than 2 seconds has 43% of bouncing rate. To keep visitors on the page, the website must be speed.
  • WordPress is one of the major supporters of WordPress E-commerce functionality. When it comes to online buyers, they expect the page to load in the seconds or else, by keeping this in mind, website need to make improvements to make the business profitable
  • Before going for optimization, the website speed should be analyzed at any online tool or somewhere. Following are best online performance checking tools

Ways to improve the speed of WordPress website

Here are the 11 ways to speed up the WordPress:

  • Selection of good web hosting

    • Hosting is the major factor that always influences the speed of the website. Shared hosting delivers poor performance because it shares same server space with countless websites and does not have any idea how much they are using and does not come to know how well the servers are optimized.
    • With technological advancements in the web hosting industry, prices of the cloud hosting services come down with the passage of time. At present we can buy dedicated cloud servers from siteground, the digital ocean. Amazon web services and Google compute engine at nominal prices.
    • Set up of those servers from scratch is a daunting task. There are third party hosting services set up optimized cloud services as easy as click and launch.

  • Use lightweight WordPress theme/framework

    • WordPress themes with dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, and social icons and shiny elements immensely appealing to Visitor. But having too many elements, higher size page content result in slow loading of the website.
    • So the best option is the usage of lightweight themes, WordPress default themes. All the themes built in Bootstrap, are a great way to enhance the speed of the WordPress website.

  • Minimize image sizes

    • Images on the website are one of the major contributors in size increase of the website. Following plugins will give best image optimization without affecting the quality of the image, Instead of manual optimize using chrome page extension or photoshop or any other tool.

  • Minify Js and CSS files

    • Running a website on Google page speed insight tool will suggest reducing the size of CSS and JS files, this means we can improve the speed of the website by decreasing the size of the files and calls. We can do it by manually if we know the way around the WordPress themes or can by installing plugins like Autoptimize. These plugins help in optimizing the CSS, JS and even HTML files WordPress website.  

  • Advanced cache plugins

    • Cache is another factor that affects the speed optimization & performance of wordpress website, installing WordPress plugins will help in varnishing the cache and better loading of the WordPress website. One of the best available plugins in the market for clearing the cache in  W3 Total cache and it will add complex rules to make the website easier.

  • Use a CDN

    • Lack of CDN will differ in the site loading speed of the website if the visitors are away from where the site is actually hosted.
    • CDN helps in site loading speed of website by keeping a copy of the website in various data centers located in different places. It will serve the web page to visit from the nearest location. Cloudflare and MaxCDN are popular among other CDN services.  

  • Enable GZIP Compression

    • Compression of files will save a lot of disk space, so enabling of GZIP Compression helps in reduction of bandwidth usage and access time of the website.
    • Whenever visitor accesses the website, their browser has to unzip the website, and this process brings down the bandwidth usage to the minimal extent.

  • Clean up WordPress database

    • Speed Optimization & Performance of wordpress website also covers deleting unwanted data from the database. This will keep backup data minimal and accurate. Its necessary to delete the spam comments, fake users, old drafts and may be unwanted plugins and themes, all of this will reduce the sizes of the database and, thus speed up the loading time.

  • Deactivate or Uninstall the plugins

    • Keeping unwanted plugins will add more junk to the database and it will increase the backup size and put an overwhelming amount of load on servers. So it’s good to get rid of the unwanted plugins.
    • The following popular web services help in automating such tasks and reduce the load on the website and servers
      • IFTTT
      • Zapier

  • Minimizing external files

    • Adding more external links will reduce the loading time by adding the big hunk of data. The website must use a low number of links, especially tracking tools(Google Analytics) and commenting system(Disqus).  

  • Disable pingbacks or trackbacks

    • Pingbacks and trackbacks are two core functions of WordPress that alert you when blog or page receives a link and Keeping this pingbacks and trackbacks will put a lot of strain on servers. So instead of this, we can use Google webmaster tool and other services to check the links of the website. This function is widely neglected when targeting website with DDoS attacks.

Conclusion

In this customer-centric market world, it’s necessary to have a speedy loading website to improve the customer experience, by minimizing the size of the page and backup data and etc. furthermore it will also improve the SERP rankings, and low bandwidth usage of hosting and faster site loading speed on the client side will benefit the short as well as long run.

Hence, this is the detailed information on Speed Optimization & Performance of wordpress website. However, if you have any further queries, get it solved by clicking here.