Increasing the WordPress site page speed can help you in various ways. It can make your site’s users happy; search engines prefer websites with high page load speeds; and your profit can improve. However, WordPress itself can’t ignite the page speed to please visitors.
But here is good news for you!
There are different tools and ways available to boost the WordPress site’s performance. You can implement these methods easily. However, it needs a bit of hard work from your side. In this blog post, we have covered the techniques and tools for optimizing the page speed of a WordPress site. But first, let’s find out why it is important to speed up the WordPress site:
The Importance of Speeding Up a WordPress Site:
Page speed and user experience are two major factors that are considered for rating a website’s performance. User experience is directly related to page speed. So, there is little to no margin of error here.
Moreover, as per Google, a website should be opened within two seconds. Any time longer than two seconds makes users close the website. Further, page performance is also a key factor for search engines like Google when ranking a website. The faster a website is, the more likely it is to get a better position in the SERPs.
Best Tips for WordPress Page Speed Optimization
Install a Caching Plugin
The WordPress site’s speed is often choked due to the issues related to the way webpages are assembled on the server.
When a visitor sends a request on a webpage from a non-cached website, the WordPress server’s PHP needs to retrieve all relevant content from your WP database, assemble it into the HTML file, and send it back to the client. This specific method offers different benefits that include an allowance of dynamic web content and a saving of server space. However, this method requires a lot of time.
A caching plugin such as LiteSpeed Cache simplifies the whole process. The plugin develops all HTML pages with PHP on your website and then saves every HTML page, which is sent to upcoming visitors upon request. When you skip the building and development part, the website’s content reaches the visitors quickly, and page speed automatically increases.
Delete Redundant Plugins
Quality always supersedes quantity when we talk about WordPress plugins. Every plugin is like a mini program, and too many plugins running in the background can really hurt the page speed of a WordPress site. Even if a plugin is unused for a long time, it will still perform unnecessary functions and consume resources in the background. So, you need to find those and cut them back.
You can delete unused WP Plugins by deactivating them and ensuring you won’t be using them in the foreseeable future. Also, do a test run after deactivating every plugin and delete those after satisfying that everything is working perfectly. Replace the deleted plugins with those that are lightweight.
Install High-Quality Plugins Only
After taking care of the quantity by uninstalling redundant plugins, it’s time to make sure you have all the plugins of high quality. The optimum WordPress plugins are those that are written with code that needs fewer server resources when they are required. The codes also take up less space on the server and are often updated along with the WordPress core.
The ideal way to ensure your remaining plugins are seamless and performance-oriented is to cross-check the plugins’ credentials with recommended lists. The list oversees how each plugin is developed and maintained. Before installing any new plugin, consider online reviews and check whether there are any major complaints about them by the users. After checking, re-do the test run to ensure the page speed stays uncompromised.
Think About A Lightweight Theme
Similar to plugins, WP themes can be another factor slowing your website on the web server. WordPress themes with high-quality photos and effects may appear appealing, but they are expensive.Fancy theme effects require heavy coding, while many themes have inefficient programming. So, a lot of coding and ineffective programming can negatively impact your website’s performance.
For optimal page speed, choose a basic theme with the features essential for your web pages. You will always have the option to add other themes later on through custom CSS or plugins.
Consider Image Optimization
Keeping heavy images is another one of the obstacles to page speed optimization for WordPress sites. To increase the WordPress website’s performance, you need to compress the size of your image files without compromising the image quality. because your major objective is to save storage space and ensure users don’t avoid seeing your visuals.
There are some tools that you can use to compress the size of image files. These include Photoshop, Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer, etc.
Avoid Video Hosting on Your Server
Video files are the most resource-intensive of all the types of files a web hosting server can store. Videos consume a lot of space and thus slow down the page speed. Loading one huge-size video can negatively impact the website’s performance.
However, videos are always a powerful tool for a website’s performance in terms of user engagement. You can use outsourced hosting services like Wistia, Vimeo, or YouTube to expand your website’s media library by uploading videos. These 3rd-party services take care of your storage; you only need to keep the video on your webpage by entering the embed code. It will make zero difference, and your user experience will massively improve.
Reduce the size of JavaScript and CSS files
File sizes for JavaScript and CSS are necessary for your website. They go beyond plain HTML walls to improve your web pages.These files are sent from your web server to your browser whenever the visitor loads a page. So, the smaller the file size, the faster your web pages will load without affecting how they work or look.
So, to reduce the file sizes of JavaScript and CSS, you need to have a WordPress plugin called Autoptimize. Autoptimize scans and deletes unnecessary JavaScript and CSS files and codes and suppresses the files without lag.
Last Word
Speed optimization is among your responsibilities, similar to other diverse aspects of running a WordPress site. Thankfully, you have different strategies to implement for optimizing your page load time and offering the speediest and most satisfying user experience. It takes a bit of time and effort to save loads of time for your visitors.
