How to speed up your WordPress website

How to speed up your WordPress website

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How to speed up your WordPress website

how to speed up your wordpress website

Have you ever given a thought on how much time does it take for your WordPress website to load? Have you ever thought that site speed has a direct impact on your business? Today, WordPress is one of the most popular platforms with roughly 20% of the websites on the Internet built on WordPress. There is no doubt that WordPress is one of the most user friendly Content Management Systems(CMS) but one should be careful in order to achieve an efficient and speedy website.

Why is site speed important?

“Time is Money”

 

This is one simple quote which all of us would have heard in some point of our lives, which truly justifies why site speed is so important. You only have a few seconds to catch a visitor’s attention on your website and if that time is wasted in loading of the webpage, the customer is already gone. This directly affects the number of visitors on your website, which in turn affects your revenue. You might have built a beautiful website, with all the right features, design and content but will it be of no use if the customer does not get to see it in that short time frame.

Even Google ranks fast loading websites better, according to its new hummingbird algorithm. So you are losing your customers by not able to hold them once they visit the site and also as your site is lagging behind in the rankings, due to slow site speed.

Here are the most useful ways to speed up your wordpress website :

1. Use an optimal website host:

A very important aspect of getting a fast paced website is a good hosting company. Choosing a wrong hosting company can significantly impact your website’s performance from low site speed to increased downtime during high traffic periods. A shared host can be used if you have limited data on your website and you have a limited number of users visiting the website. It is not wise to go for the cheapest one, the key is to do your research and look for a hosting company which provides value, for the money it asks for.
We would recommend HostGator, which provides both shared hosting services as well as dedicated servers for your website.

2. Using the right Plugins

Plugins for WordPress are meant for improving functionality and making life easier for the users  but they can have a negative impact on the usability of the website if not chosen wisely. It becomes complicated when you are using more than one plugin for similar functions and they both can conflict each other’s use hence affecting performance.  P3 plugin profiler is one of the plugins available that will check all the front end as well as back end plugins and identify which one is affecting the overall performance of the website.We strongly recommend to delete the plugins that are not in use rather than just deactivating them.

3. Optimize your Database

: Another way of improving site speed will be to clean up your database. You can do it manually through phpMyAdmin. You can select all the necessary tables, choose “Repair” and then repeat the same process using “<strong”>Optimize Table.” You can also remove unnecessary or outdated tables that might be existing in the database due to previously installed plugins. We also recommend WP-Optimize which can automatically optimize your existing database.You should definitely take a backup of your current database before using this plugin.

4. Caching

: The best thing about WordPress is that you have so many plugins to choose from, they are user friendly and to top it up, they are FREE. A Caching plugin is a must-have for every WordPress website as it drastically reduces the load time but it can be quite cumbersome to enable one of these, so one should take a backup of your existing website and consult an expert. W3 Total Cache is one of the best caching plugins and we definitely recommend it.

5. Delete post revisions

: This method is unheard of and yet it is one of the most effective solution when it comes to increase site speed. This is a simple method of getting your site run faster. Every time a post is edited, WordPress saves an old version of it so you can end up having 10-15 versions on your website which slows the website down. The best way to remove these versions is by using a plugin called Better Delete Revision, which does exactly what the name suggests.

6. Image Optimization:

We all want that our websites should look striking in the first go and we need images of highest quality to showcase our product or service. But these images do not have to be large enough to look eye catching. Heavy size images put a huge burden on the load time of our websites so they have to optimized in several lossless ways including stripping meta data and compressing the images. The trending plugin to optimize images is EWWW Image Optimiser and we give it a thumbs up.

You can try implementing these methods and see the results yourself at Pingdom, Web Page Test and Gtmetrix.

There are several other ways which can considerably reduce the load time of your website but require EXPERT level knowledge for which you can contact us today and have a “FLASH” load time for your website.