In this article, we will be discussing how to speed up WordPress websites with different strategies.
Does this happen to you whenever users search your website on Google and the site does not load? If your answer is “Yes” then this article might be helpful for you.
Fast-loading websites are an important factor to grow your online business, slow loading websites decrease pageviews and affect the user experience. Everyone in this fast-paced world wants everything on their plate within seconds. They prefer a fast-loading website over a sluggish one.
8 simple ways to speed up WordPress website
When we browse any website on Google it will appear within a fraction of seconds but sometimes it doesn’t happen due to many reasons and for that, you start blaming your hosting plan, plugins, and themes. Speeding up your website is not like going the extra mile, you can optimize your site speed by following 8 easy methods that will guarantee to speed up your website.
1. Pick a reliable hosting plan
Picking the right hosting plan is the foremost step in speeding up a WordPress website. There are several categories of hosting: Shared hosting, VPS hosting, and cloud hosting. You have to decide which hosting plan fits best with your website needs. Shared hosting plans are affordable as compared to other hosting plans newer website owners prefer shared hosting plans before upgrading themselves online. The cons of using a shared website are that many other websites are also running on your server and it might affect your site performance as other websites start getting more clicks.
Websites that have high traffic prefer VPS or Dedicated hosting plans. They provide enough resources to the server to tackle high traffic on their website. After deciding on a hosting plan, you can run your website with a high loading speed. In Hostiera, we used a light-speed web server this will allow our users to tackle high traffic on their website.
Nowadays, Cloud hosting is a great option for web hosting and it is quite affordable. On cloud hosting, multiple servers work on your website. But you are not allocating all of the resources with them.
2. Chooses the closest server location
Whenever you align domain and hosting it is better to choose the nearest server location of the hosting provider. Your website travels from one server to other servers to provide information on your website to visitors. In case you are using a server far away then, it will slow down your server.
You can change your server location by going to hPanel on the hosting plan. And add the nearest server. It may take 24 to 48 hours to transfer the server location and this will speed up WordPress website.
3. Use a content delivery network
To speed up WordPress website you need to use a CDN (content delivery network). It is a group of servers that are available in every location. Whenever you connect your website with this server, CDN will save a copy of your website on each server so that user from all around the world doesn’t need to access your specific server instead they can access the server nearest to them. On the hPanel, search domain and enable Cloudflare, now your Cloudflare CDN server is connected.
4. Choose an optimized WordPress theme
Whenever you make a WordPress website it is essential to optimize its theme. You should use well-optimized code means that your website code must be under WordPress and the World Wide Web Consortium. Your theme should be lightweight around 100 kb and it should be compatible with every browser like Google Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge.
Choose a responsive theme so that the visitor can access your website from any device. If you want to learn more about WordPress themes you can read the article How to choose a WordPress theme. The last factor for the theme is that it should be AMP-ready. AMP is a technology that allows mobile users to access websites with a fast loading speed and increase WordPress website speed.
5. Optimize image size
Images are an important part of your content, it makes things clear and appealing. But the big size of the image can slow down your website always upload images that are 100kb or less. If you purchase images from premium sites like Shutterstock and Unsplash these pictures’ sizes range from 3 to 10MB. You can optimize images through free tools like Tinypng and ResizePixel. Images have different formats like JPEG, PNG, AND webP. JPEG is used for photos while PNG is used for drawing and graphics. WebP images are high in resolution but have a smaller size. To speed up WordPress website make sure you optimize pictures before uploading them to your website
6. Optimize each web page
Make sure the size of each web page is not more than 3MB. Each web page is consist of content, images, CSS, and Javascript. Make sure you have a light size website this can increase website loading speed. A great way to check the loading time is Pingdom. It is a speed testing monitor it will tell the size of images JavaScript, CSS, and images. If your web pages are more than 3MB chances are your website will run slow.
7. Avoid using too many plugins
Many website owners tend to use many plugins at a time they may slow down your website. Consider the plugins as weight and the website as a car the more you put on the weight it becomes more challenging to run at a high speed. Try to optimize plugin quantity and use less than 10 to 12 plugins especially when you are using shared hosting. But that’s not true for every website some websites are running even 20 plugins with fast loading speed because they are using a more reliable hosting plan like Dedicated servers.
It is also essential to delete any unused plugins as they may increase security concerns for the website.
8. Optimize server request
What is a server request? When you have too many images, plugins, and JavaScript on your webpage. The browser will send too many requests to your WordPress server to know the information in your content. Too many requests will slow down your website. You can check how many requests your browser is sending through Pingdom. Try to keep it below 80.
With all these ways now you are fully aware of how to speed up WordPress website.
How to increase WordPress website speed without plugin
You can increase WordPress website speed without using any plugin in different ways.
- Using a reliable hosting plan such as Cloud hosting.
- Optimizing the size of the content on your web page including images, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Keeping the server request below 80.
- Choosing an optimized WordPress theme.
- Uninstall any plugins that are not in use.
Increase website speed WordPress plugin free
There are many free WordPress plugins to increase WordPress website speed.
- WP-Optimize
- Lazy load by WP rocket
- WP Super Minify
- W3 Total Cache plugin
- WP Smush
- WP Socializer
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