In this time and age, a fast website is a must-have for any online business. Whether you are an e-commerce store owner, business owner, or blogger, websites that load faster offer a better user experience, seamless surfing, and lesser consumption of resources (especially bandwidth and RAM). There shouldn’t be any justification for operating a slow website. No user wants to spend the whole of their day waiting for a website to load. A website owner will lose his or her users if the users observe that the site is slow. These users will leave for a site that loads faster. So, it is important you get your site to run fast.

Tips to Speed Up WordPress Performance

Below are some tips to speed up your WordPress performance.

1. Choose a High-Quality WordPress Hosting Provider

You may experience frustrating site speed if your site is on shared web hosting. There is the possibility of it contending with other websites for similar resources. For smaller websites, shared web hosting can be entirely acceptable, given that it is hosted by a respected and reliable provider and has sufficient memory space. Once your website starts reaching a rough estimate of 30k monthly visitors, you should seriously consider moving to a more reliable server, or at least, a virtual private server (VPS). These suggested options will help to prevent your competitors from monopolizing all the shared resources.

2. Apply WordPress Updates Promptly

To any security expert, applying updates quickly seems like a thoughtless decision. Yet, in practice, roughly 40% of WordPress websites are operating the latest version. Software updates include speed tweaks in extension to security developments. So ensure you update as soon as possible by checking for daily available updates.

3. Avoid Using Bloated Themes

You should choose a WordPress theme with speed in mind. Many WordPress themes come loaded with features that don’t get used. These unused features stored on the server in an inactive state can build a drag on performance.

4. Use a Caching Plugin

Caching your website can speed up your site performance. Caching is among the most important fixes on this list. With a caching plugin, the copies of recently generated pages are saved in memory where they can be quickly regained the next time they are needed.

5. Optimize Images

One of the easiest ways to boost your WordPress performance is to make sure that images are in an applicable format (GIF or PNG for graphics, JPEG for photos) and that they are not larger than they need to be. Compress large images so that it can be easy for your end-users to download them. This can be manually done before they are uploaded. You can also automate the compression process by making use of WP Smush, which is a plugin that automatically compresses any uploaded image on your WordPress website.

6. Consider a CDN (content delivery network)

A CDN is a geographically allocated group of servers that are connected to help deliver content quickly. The duplicates of your static website content, which includes JavaScript files, stylesheets, and images, are cached in the content delivery network. For high-traffic websites, a CDN provides more benefits. Without a content delivery network, all of your pages will be served from a single location, putting the full load on a single server. With a content delivery network, server load is allotted across multiple sites other than your site. A content delivery network can also protect your website from security hazards such as DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.

7. Best WordPress Speed Plugins

Your website content is stored on your WordPress database. The website content includes custom posts, comments, pages, revisions, and blog posts. It is also where plugins and themes track their settings and data. As your website grows, the database grows along with it, and so also does the proportion of overhead needed by individual tables in the database. The database becomes less efficient as the overhead and size increase. Frequent optimization of your plugins can help fix this problem and consequently increase the speed performance of your website.

8. Checkup Your Plugins

An extra code is added with every plugin you add to your website. Some add more plugins because resources can be loaded from other domains. When choosing plugins, only select those offered by popular developers or those that are approved by trusted sources. If you discover a plugin is slowing down your website, replace it with another one that does the exact job more efficiently.

9. Remove Unnecessary Plugins

Every plugin expends resources and reduces website speed. So, don’t leave unused or old plugins in your database. Simply remove or delete them to enhance WordPress performance.

10. Set an Expires Header for Static Resources

An expires header is a method of setting your browsers, not to re-fetch content that is not likely to be altered since the last time it was loaded. Rather than retrieving a new copy of the resource from your web server, your browser will use the copy stored on your computer, which is quicker to retrieve.

11. Disable Hotlinking

Hotlinking is a kind of bandwidth theft. This is the way it works: another webmaster links from within their content directly to the content on your website (usually as a video or an image). The image will be displayed on the intruder’s website, but in the real sense, it is loaded from yours.

Hotlinking can increase the load on your server, thereby decreasing your website’s performance. Your website can be protected from hotlinking by barring outside links to specific kinds of content like images on your website.

12. Break Comments into Pages

It is incredible getting plenty of comments on your blog. However, plenty of comments can reduce the speed of your page load. To eradicate this problem;

• Go to setting.
• Click discussion
• Check the box next to the option “Break comments into pages”
• Then, identify how many comments you want per page and whether it should display the oldest or newest first.

Conclusion

The above few tips if applied correctly should be enough to boost the speed performance of your WordPress website. Having a website that loads pages fast attracts more visitors and, in turn, generates more profit for the site owner. A slow website, on the other hand, will frustrate your users and make them abandon your site for another that loads faster.