Over 60% of the web is currently powered by WordPress. Whereas this is best additionally, more themes. plugins, and technologies available..

For the daily WordPress user, this can cause some complications when their site starts to bottleneck and they don’t know where to start troubleshooting.

Having a fast WordPress website is important in the fast-paced digital world. Users are generally impatient and will leave sites that take a long time to load.

This means that if your site is running at a slow pace, you could be losing a lot of website traffic.

Why is it necessary to speed up WordPress?

  1. Search engines rank websites with fast-loading times. So, if you want to improve your rank in the SERPs, improving speed should be given importance.
  2. Site-loading speed of more than 2 seconds usually causes around 47 percent of visitors to bounce off the website. To keep about half of your viewers interested, you should speed up your WordPress.
  3. Online buyers expect the page to load within a second. So, if you have an eCommerce website on WordPress it is better to have a fast-loading site.

What slows down your WordPress Website?

  • Web Hosting – When your web hosting server is not configured properly it can slow down your website speed.
  • WordPress Configuration – If your WordPress site is not serving cached pages, it can cause your website to be slow or crash.
  • Page Size – Especially images that aren’t optimized for the web.
  • Bad Plugins – Poorly coded plugins can significantly slow down your website.
  • External scripts – External scripts such as ads, font loaders, etc can impact your website performance as well.

Techniques to make your WordPress Website perform better

1. Minifying the number of JS and CSS files:

By decreasing the number of CSS and JS calls and the size of the files, you can enhance the site-loading speed. You need to find unused CSS and JS files, and then clean up CSS and JS with a plugin. The minification decreases a few kilobytes of data on most of the WordPress sites.

The term ‘Minify’ is a method that makes your website file size smaller. It removes white spaces, lines, and unnecessary characters from the source code. It is not required that you have to be a developer or know the programming languages to minify your site files.

Minification has become a normal practice in the world of website design and there are many tools available to do the work for you.

2. Enable Caching:

By enabling caching on your website, you can store the site data locally in temporary storage spaces known as caches. This means that browsers can load your site files easily and will not have to re-download each and everything from your server

Caching lets your WordPress site skip several steps. Instead of running through the entire page generation process, your caching plugin will make a copy of the page after the first load, and then serve that cached version to every following user.

You can make use of several caching or security plugins like Word fence, W3 Total Cache, Secure Firewall, etc.

3. Image Optimization:

Oversized images are the most standard reason for slow WordPress sites. The bigger the picture files on your website, the more time your site takes to load. Optimizing your images is a critical step to improve the speed of your website.

It is the process of reducing their file size by using a plugin or script, which speeds up the load time of the page.

If you want to optimize the images manually using Chrome Page Speed or Photoshop or any other tools, the process will take a longer time. There are many image optimization plugins available for just about everything you can think of.

4. Use a CDN

The visitors of your website come from various locations in the world, and the site-loading speed will vary if the visitors are far away from where your site is hosted.

Content Delivery Networks help in keeping the site-loading speed to a minimum for visitors from different countries. The primary function is to serve the webpage to a visitor from the nearest location

In addition to CDN, you can also implement SSL(Secure Socket Layer). An SSL certificate can be bought for any website and provides an additional layer of security for sites. SSL works with HTTP/2, which has a fundamental focus on performance improvements.

By installing an SSL certificate, your site can make use of HTTP/2, which will result in faster web page load speed.

5. Use a proper theme

To optimize your load time, it is important to carefully select your WordPress theme. If your WordPress theme is equipped with several built-in features, you may consider shifting to a faster theme that loads quicker.

The perfect theme will be coded to the highest standards, lightweight, as well as SEO-friendly. SEO is an important factor that helps to boost your business. You can increase the visibility of your website with SEO.

Most of the themes will have a responsive design, which is necessary for a fast mobile experience.  An ideal WordPress theme is simple with only the most necessary features that are lightweight and can ensure that your site loads quickly.

You can add more design elements or effects using plugins or custom CSS.

How to measure your WordPress Site speed?

The best way to test your site’s performance is to make use of a speed test tool. All you need to do is type in the URL of the page you want to test and the tool will give you the data to assess its performance. Some of the best free speed test tools are WebPageTest, GTmetrix, and Google PageSpeed Insights

Conclusion

WordPress might seem complex at first, but over time you will promote your website with ease and build it to perfection.

With so many choices available, it might be confusing to choose what’s best for you. It is best if you keep your website simple to avoid slow page load.

The quicker your website loads, the better user experience you deliver — it’s as straightforward as that. Better user experience directs to higher conversion rates, lower bounce rates, and many more.