8 Tips to Boost Loading Speed of WordPress Website
Posted on Sep, 17, 2019 I EliseWordPress is undoubtedly the most popular platform on which websites are built. It serves such a huge portion of the population that each user must formulate ways of making their particular site perform optimally.
Over the years a lot of products in the form of plugins and other support elements have emerged to support and improve the performance of WordPress platforms. It is however important that one knows and chooses just the right plugins and support factors in order to succeed as a WordPress user. While too many plugins may hamper the performance of a WordPress-supported website, failure to incorporate any may equally lead to dismal performance.
In this discussion, we look at just a few ways in which you can speed up your WordPress website and make it perform at its very best.
1. Choose Your WordPress Host Carefully
An important factor in the development of any website is your hosting provider. It is of such primary importance that your host will simply make or break your dream of owning and running a WordPress site.
When choosing a hosting provider, consider factors such as bandwidth, space, sharing among others. Whereas free and shared providers give you an opportunity to start at a low cost, they might delay your achievement given that they are available to so many people. In addition, choose a hosting provider who offers great after-sale services, helps to handle challenges that may as you develop and manage your website.
2. Choose a Theme That Is Less Complicated
Themes allow users to navigate through your website with ease. Whereas you may be tempted to choose a Webpress theme that has a lot of fancy elements and purports to give you the kind of response you desire, they may take a toll on the server and make it slow to respond.
In choosing a theme, the best approach is to look at practicality. Choose a theme that caters for what you want to achieve in the easiest way possible without giving visitors to your website a hard time. This also applies to the template you pick. At the very begin, try out a startup bootstrap template builder and keep learning as you go forward.
3. Plugins Play a Central Role
Plugins work like small bugs behind the scenes to accelerate the performance of your website. Choose your plugins wisely, trying as much as possible to avoid and clean up WordPress plugins that give little support to your website.
WordPress plugins are so many and all of them promise to give your website a head start in one way or the other. Before installing plugins on your website, understand their role, how they work and even check their reviews.
From time to time, plugins may get outdone or simply cease to be as important after playing a given role. In other words, you must do a review of what you need and uninstall what is unnecessary.
4. Minimize Videos and Images On Your Website.
You cannot underestimate the role of images, graphs, and videos in optimizing your website. However, too many and too large images will slow down its performance. In the same scale, too many videos that take up lots of space and time to respond will work against your Adjust the size of images on your website and test each on its own merit.
There are various plugins that can assist you to scale the images on your website just to the right size. The important thing is to experiment with them so that you find the right ones that work appropriately for you.
5. Consider Using a CDN
CDN refers to Content Delivery Network. In simple terms, this is a system created to easily store content in different locations around the globe. The closer your visitors are to a suitable CDN, the faster it is to deliver content to them.
Website loading time is such an instrumental part of website performance that any sluggish behavior might send away your visitors. CDN will ensure that regardless of where visitors are, content is delivered to them as soon as they access your site.
6. Regular Database Updates
Even without your knowledge, a lot of things will be happening at the back-end of your WordPress website. From these and other activities, your site will accumulate data that may sometimes clog up and make stall or significantly slow down the performance of your website.
You must deliberately update your database to keep it lean and clean. At any given time, ensure that only that which is necessary and works to better the performance of your website can be found within. You may need to constantly clear the cache or generally have a programmed time-frame of optimizing your website constantly.
7. Gzip Compression
You probably have done zip compressions on folders on your computer at some point. This allows folders and files to leaner and takes up lesser space than before. This is also possible with your website. When files are made smaller, it makes them easier to download especially when you have repetitive data.
In modern configuration, many hosts enable implementation of a gzip server, therefore, minimizing the need for a technical approach. Even if your host doesn’t provide for gzip compression, you can still do it in an easy do-it-yourself process.
8. Keep Your Website Update.
Perhaps there would be no need to lay more emphasis on this but it is equally important. Many website owners are simply content when they have their sites up and running and hardly go back to keep the information and all other technical aspects up to date.
For your website to perform at its optimum, you must keep contents, plugins and all other elements up to date. Constantly check out what’s new and what is important to help your website rank better on search engines and respond faster to various commands.
Conclusion
There are lots of approaches that can be given to optimizing WordPress site performance. One of the key elements is to ensure that you keep learning and watching from peers and competitors alike. This will enable you to advance your site technologically and with the demands of the day.
When optimizing your website, always have your visitors in mind for they are your main consumers and main target of any information you put out there.
