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How to increase the speed of WordPress websites is a very popular topic. There are many ways that you can use to increase the speed of your WordPress website. It is our endeavor to share with you as many methods as we know.
Why should you increase the speed of your WordPress website?
There are many reasons for you to increase the speed of your WordPress website, which decide website success and success.
Search engines (such as Google) prefer fast-loading websites over slow-loading websites. So if you want to increase your position in the SERPs, then the loading speed of the website should be your priority.
According to research, the bounce rate of websites that take 2 or more seconds to load increases up to 47 percent. If you want to stop more than half the visitors, then it is necessary to increase the speed of your WordPress website.
Those who are online buyers are very desperate and they want the website to be loaded within 1 second as soon as they click on the link. If you are running an e-commerce website on WordPress ( WordPress Course ) then you must keep in mind the loading speed of your website. You can also optimize the WordPress site
How to check the loading time of your website?
First of all, analyze the current load time of your website. Remember that the loading speed can be different for each page as it depends on several things:
- Size of that page
- How many requests does it generate
- is it cached or not
And finally, what type of content is it (static or dynamic)
The load time is tested by considering the homepage of any website as a benchmark. To check the speed of the website, these 3 websites given below are used the most.
- WebPageTest.org
- Tools.Pingdom.com
PageSpeed Insights (It not only checks your website’s load time speed but also gives suggestions on what changes you should make to increase the speed.)
Here are 9 ways by which you can increase the speed of your WordPress website:
1- Choose a Good Web Hosting Provider
Your WordPress hosting provider is a very important factor that affects the speed of your website. You may like the option of Shared Hosting to host your website, which provides unlimited bandwidth, space, emails, domain, and much more. But
The thing that we forget is that when there is a lot of traffic on your website, then at that time Shared Hosting gets spread and you get the new one that you have promised. Along with this, the guarantee which is 99% Uptime also gets spread.
In Shared Hosting, you get very poor performance because you do not know how many more websites are hosted in the same server space and how many resources are being used. But if you are just starting out then you do not need to invest that much money and neither will the initial traffic on the new website come.
2- Use a lightweight WordPress theme/framework
It is true that the WordPress theme which has a lot of dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, social icons, and some flashy things attracts everyone’s eyes. But remember, if all these together increase the size of your page, then it slows down your website speed.
The only way to avoid them is to use a lightweight theme. For this, you can either use the default themes of WordPress or it will be appropriate to use a lightweight theme like Generatepress.
3- Reduce Image size
Images play a major role in increasing the size of any webpage. The way to avoid this is to reduce the size of your image without compromising the quality.
If you want to optimize the image size yourself, then you can use Chrome extensions like PageSpeed Insight or Photoshop but sure it will take a lot of time. There is a special thing in WordPress that you get plugins to do everything. Below are the names of some useful plugins to reduce the image size.
- Optimole
- WP Smuch
- EWWW Image Optimizer
If you use any of the above-mentioned plugins, then you will see a difference in the load time due to the reduced image size to a great extent.
4- Minify JavaScript and CSS files
If you check your website on Google PageSpeed Insights tool, then you will see advice to reduce the size of CSS and JS files. This means that if you increase the size of JV and CSS, then the speed of the website can be increased further.
If you have knowledge about WordPress themes, then you can also make changes yourself by reading this guide of Google. If you do not know about it, then as I have already told you that you will get plugins for every task in WordPress, then you can use Autoptimize Plugin. It can optimize the CSS, JV, and even HTML of your WordPress website.
5- Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
You must know that your website can be accessed from any corner of the world, so it is obvious that if a person accesses your website from a faraway country, then it will take a little more time. There are many CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) that help visitors from different countries to reduce the time it takes to load your website.
A CDN keeps a copy of your website at its various data centers. Whenever a person visits that website, it delivers that webpage from the nearest data center. Cloudflare and MaxCDN are the most popular CND (Content Delivery Network).
6- Enable GZIP compression
When you compress files on your computer, you must have notice that their size is reduce to a great extent, GZIP also does the same thing for your website. With this, you can see a lot of improvement in the load time of your website.
GZIP compresses a lot of files and whenever a visitor accesses your website, their browser will have to unzip that file first. It also reduces your bandwidth usage.
For this, you can either use the plugin named PageSpeed Ninja or you can add the following codes to the .htaccess file:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
7- Keep WordPress database clean
You keep deleting unused data which is of no use. It reduces the size of your database as well as keeps the size of the backup small. Delete Spam Comments, Fake Users, Old Drafts as well as Unwated Plugins. And Themes which can drastically change the speed of your website.
8- Uninstall or delete plugins
If you keep unwanted plugins on your WordPress website, then it collects a lot of junk in your web file. Along with this, the size of your backup file will also increase significantly and it affects your server. That’s why you delete the unused plugins and use alternative methods of some plugins. (like plugins sharing posts on social media.
IFTTT and Zapier are two such web services that can help you do this. And reduce the load on your server.
9- Deactivate Pingbacks and Trackbacks
Pingbacks and trackbacks are two such services of WordPress. That sends you alerts whenever someone links to your blog or page. It may sound appealing, but you can check links to your websites using other services. Such as Google Webmaster or other websites.
Keeping pingbacks and trackbacks active puts extra load on your server. This is because, whenever someone links to your website, it generates a request from WordPress. This functionality is widely misuse when targeting a website with DDoS attacks.
You can deactivate this option by going to WP-Admin-Settings-Discussion “Allow link notification from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)”. This will all be effective in increasing the speed of your website.
