Page load times are an integral component of WordPress website performance and have an enormous influence on bounce rates, conversions, and search rankings.
If you like your site to load faster, here certainly are a few detailed steps you can take. Spending just a couple of minutes improving WordPress website speed could yield big dividends over time.
Pick Your Host Provider
If you want to speed up your WordPress site, it is key that you select an ideal host provider. Doing so will ensure you make the most out of your site while improving visitor experiences and making the right choice when selecting a provider. Before selecting one, ensure you understand which features may be available before making your selection.
First, determine what kind of hosting service you require for your WordPress website. There are various options, including shared, VPSs, and dedicated servers – each has its own advantages, but ultimately the ideal choice depends on its size and the kind of traffic it receives.
Storage requirements should also be carefully considered. Your site size can depend on this, so will how fast its pages load – more content means more space is required; in the case of more than 500MB.
RAM (random access memory) is another critical element for website performance, enabling your server to store and retrieve information quickly and efficiently. At a minimum, 512MB should be enough RAM to keep your WordPress site operating efficiently.
Choose a host with an advanced network and enough bandwidth for the anticipated growth of your site if you plan to attract thousands or millions of visitors monthly.
Speed matters immensely for search engine rankings and visitor experience on your website; therefore, it is vitally important that you monitor its performance with tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix.
Choose a server near where your visitors are to boost the speed of your website. A CDN, or content delivery network, may also prove invaluable in this regard as it distributes your content across various servers around the globe.
Find a web host with an intuitive control panel to make website management simpler for yourself and reduce support requests from third parties.
Search for a hosting provider with various features, such as SSL certification, unlimited storage space and one-click installation of popular content management systems such as WordPress. This shows they care about providing what you need at a fair price.
Don’t Use a Heavy Theme
When it comes to speeding up your WordPress website, be mindful of what you use. One of the main culprits of slow loading times can be heavy themes that consume too many resources and waste your website’s bandwidth.
An overloaded theme can take its toll on website performance. Each extra plugin and tool must load to function, increasing page load times exponentially.
But that doesn’t mean all themes with lots of features are bad; lightweight themes with only what’s necessary should be chosen instead.
Heavy themes for your WordPress website should also be avoided because they consume an excessive amount of server resources and could have an adverse impact on its performance. This is particularly problematic on shared servers where resources must be shared among several other websites.
These themes often include many extra features that won’t add anything unique or useful for your business and could result in lost customers. This makes creating an individual look difficult while potentially leading to missed sales opportunities.
If you want to avoid themes with too much unnecessary code, the best way is to check compatibility and functionality prior to making any purchases. A theme compatible with the latest version of WordPress should give an indication of its performance without taxing your server too much.
An effective website utilizes a theme optimized for its specific type. For instance, if your business specializes in construction work, look for themes designed specifically for building firms and companies.
Apart from that, it is also important to consider whether the theme fits with your brand’s individual identity or not. Prebuilt themes designed for general audiences often strip your company’s brand of its individuality and character and will not reflect them online.
Image Optimization
Image optimization is an integral component of search engine optimization that can easily be completed in just a few steps. By optimizing images on your WordPress website and increasing traffic from search engines, image optimization can increase its speed as well as bring additional visitors.
One of the best methods, I’ve found for optimizing your images online is to focus on using web-optimized file formats like JPEG, PNG, and GIF, these will reduce file sizes and make downloads simpler.
Compression is another image optimization method, used to reduce file sizes and free up space on your server while helping your website load faster.
Compress all images uploaded to your WordPress website to enhance its performance, enhance user experience, and increase conversions. This can lead to increased customer loyalty and conversions.
Also, improving page speed will have an indirect benefit in Google rankings – as page load speed plays an integral part in search results, you should always pay close attention to its speed when updating or building websites.
Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse are great tools to use when testing site performance, providing a detailed report of its speed and performance.
Check the maximum display size of your images as this will determine which resolution will be presented to users depending on which device they’re using.
Once you understand this information, you can tailor your images so they will serve at an appropriate resolution for every device. This is especially important if your site provides various image sizes for different devices.
Image optimization requires striking a delicate balance between showing high-quality images and keeping their size to an absolute minimum. This can be accomplished using compression as well as resizing images to fit onto your pages appropriately.
As a general guideline, high-quality images should have at least 1500 pixels in resolution while low-quality ones should have 2000. This ensures they won’t look pixelated on larger screens and mobile devices.
Enable GZIP Compression
GZIP compression is one of the fastest and simplest ways to quickly accelerate a WordPress site, shrinking HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files and improving page load times.
Gzip is an open-source algorithm designed to detect and remove redundant text data in text files, replacing repeated strings with unique identifiers that create smaller files while increasing page speed.
Website speed is an essential element in the modern Internet era as a fast website is one of the top ranking factors on Google search results pages. A faster experience for visitors also increases conversions from them.
Enabling GZIP on your WordPress website is a straightforward and free process, which only involves editing a few files on the server configuration file to activate GZIP. W3 Total Cache offers one way of doing this or editing your htaccess file can do the trick too.
Use our free online test tool to check if gzip compression has been enabled on your website and show how much space has been saved by doing so.
If your web server has enabled gzip compression, it should provide the content-encoding: gzip header in its response to your browser. This tells your browser to decompress gzip-encoded files on the server so they can be delivered more efficiently to you.
Checking whether gzip has been enabled on your web server can also be accomplished using the browser developer tools’ network tab. Here you should see either content-encoding: gzip or brotli in response headers to determine whether your page has been compressed.
There are multiple ways you can enable gzip on your WordPress website, including installing WP Super Cache from within the Plugins section of the WordPress dashboard. This plugin provides excellent compression; just ensure it’s installed and configured properly or else this could cause issues.
In Conclusion
There are multiple effective ways how to speed up my WordPress site. If you are looking to start or even improve your current WordPress site. We have a community and training system that will teach you exactly what is working with blog posts and online marketing. You can get FREE access in this Review.
Let me know if you have any specific questions that I can answer for you by leaving me a comment below.