21 Top Techniques To Speed Up Your WordPress Website

9
Oct 2020

Posted by: Category:Web Design & Development

In this technological era, every business organization is looking to have an online presence. They are looking forward to having a good website that can help them get customers, increase business sales, and help in growing the business. So when it comes to websites, there is nothing better than the WordPress platform. Businesses can develop dynamic websites and host them. But do you think that just designing a website and hosting it is enough to get good customers? Well, there are many essential factors that are working to lure the customers. One of them is the speed of the website. If the customers come to your website just to see the loading sign, they won’t bother to wait even for a few seconds. Therefore, it is very essential to increase the speed of WordPress websites so that you do not lose out on your valued customers.

 

21 Top Techniques To Speed Up Your WordPress Website

We are here to share with you 21 amazing techniques that will enhance the speed of your WordPress website. These techniques are beneficial for everyone, right from developers, business owners to bloggers. Everyone can employ these techniques to improve the user experience.

#1 Always Ensure That You Are Choosing The Most Reliable Hosting Service Provider

While selecting the right hosting service provider for your WordPress website make sure they are capable of offering excellent speed and 24/7 technical support. As per the hosting experts, it is always recommended to choose a service provider that can provide you with a wide range of useful services such as regular data backup, domain name registration, various Google app integration, unlimited disk space, provision of hosting multiple sites, etc.

#2 Focus On The WordPress Website Theme You Choose

Well, you might be wondering how themes could affect the website speed, but it plays a crucial role in WordPress website optimization. You must not choose a heavy website full of animation and dynamic features. The theme you must opt for should have the right balance of images as well as the content. In this way, it will not put an excessive load on the website speed. Choosing a simple theme will have a great impact on the WordPress website’s speed.

#3 Are You Optimizing Your WordPress Database Regularly?

After choosing the right theme, the next big thing you should focus on is the database. Optimizing your database would help you speed up your WordPress website. Well, it is a tedious and daunting task, but you do not have to do it manually. You can install plugins like WP optimizer and WP DB Manager to efficiently optimizing and managing your entire database.

#4 WP Rocket Plugin – To Speed Up The WordPress Website

Well, a WordPress website’s speed can also be determined by caching. If you are looking forward to boosting the WordPress website speed, then it is essential to ensure that you are making use of WP Rocket Plugin.

WP Rocket Plugin is easy to use and a comprehensive plugin that helps in optimizing caching. Moreover, the plugin is designed in such a way that it provides a smooth and hassle-free user experience by enhancing the performance of the server.

#5 Optimizing Images

Simple Yet Effective Technique: Well, whenever you are posting new content you are adding high-quality images to the content. No doubt you must use high-quality images to increase the user’s interest in the topic. But this increases the unreasonable load on the website and reduces the overall speed of the WordPress website. In such a situation, it is always better to optimize the images. While optimizing you must ensure that you are reducing the overall size of the image without affecting the image quality.

You can make use of ShortPixel or TinyPNG, as they can help you in compressing JPG, PNG, PDF, and GIF images without diminishing the quality of the image.

#6 Make Use OF gZIP Compression Technique

The amount of data that gets transferred between the server and the user is vast. This data transfer can increase the load on the website and slow down its performance. So is there any solution? Well yes, you can make use of the gZIP compression technique. With this, you can compress all the data files up to 70% of the original size, such as CSS files and various Javascript files. This technique is effective in reducing the load time and increasing the speed of the WordPress website fourfold.

#7 File Minification Strategy

WordPress website has different data files such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. These are essential website files that help in improving the look and feel of the website. Employing so many files generally increases the load on the WordPress website because multiple HTTP requests would be sent at a time. So you must embrace a compression technique called Minification, as it would help in reducing the number of HTTP requests made to the Server.

#8 Get Rid Of All The Unwanted Plugins To Increase The Speed Of The WordPress Website

Generally plugins are useful as they are the tools that help in managing the website efficiently. But there might be some unwanted plugins that are not used at all but contribute to increasing the load on the website. Moreover, they increase the size of the backup data and webs files and put a lot of load on server resources. Well, if you want to boost the WordPress website speed, you must clean up all the unwanted plugins.

#9 Do You Know What Lazy Loading Is?

In the Lazy Loading technique, you are making use of external CSS files rather than Inline CSS code. In this way, you can easily load the “above the fold” content of the website within nanoseconds. The above part would load faster than the rest of the website. When you enable the Lazy Loading technique you are loading the content first, followed by images and thumbnails of videos/podcasts. In this way, you can focus on user retention and do not let the user leave the site.

#10 Focus On Reducing The Redirects To Increase The Page Speed

You make use of redirects on a website when you want to remove issues related to broken links. As and when the website keeps growing, there will be numerous such pages that you would need to move or delete and it would result in broken links. These broken links generate additional HTTP requests and increase the loading time of the website. So you must make use of a highly efficient tool Screaming Frog in order to identify all the redirects so that you can get rid of them.

#11 Making Use Of CDN

Content Delivery Network: Most of the websites make use of CDN. It is the best way of delivering the highest quality content to the users. Besides this, CDN is efficient in speeding up the WordPress website. How? CDN focuses on replicating the entire set of static content available on the website, including images, CSS, Javascript, etc, and serving it to the users from the nearest servers. This technique is highly beneficial in greatly speeding up the download time on your website, thereby keeping your visitors from moving on to other websites.

#12 Focus On Disabling Pingback and Trackback

Turning off Pingbacks and Trackbacks will help you in reducing the loading time by reducing the excessive load which your website receives every time a blog mentions your site. It is done in a manner that does not affect the backlinks.
Moreover, you can efficiently maintain the website traffic and also the speed of your WordPress website.

#13 Is Your WordPress website Speed Reduced Due To Spam Content? Make Use Of Akismet

If your website is doing great, spamming is common. It fills up the database space with unwanted things and reduces the speed of the website. Install the Akismet plugin. It is a highly efficient tool that helps in filtering out spam content. It automatically checks all comments and filters out spam. Moreover, it helps in clearing the disk space and increases the speed of the WordPress website.

#14 Work On WordPress Widget

Well, the WordPress platform gives you the facility to customize the entire layout of the website with the help of widgets. But on a website, there are numerous 3rd party elements that can hamper your site’s speed. Due to the presence of these unwanted widgets, the website load time increases. So what to do? Make use of plugin Lazy Widget Loader, it will help in optimizing the widgets. Moreover, it will ensure that only that content is loaded, which is required by the user. In this way, you can optimize your site’s speed and improve your bandwidth usage and page load time.

#15 Employ Faster Slider Plugins

Sliders are considered the most popular design element that can be added to WordPress websites. But if the sliders are not well optimized, it can significantly increase your site’s page load time. Therefore, to avoid such scenarios, install a faster slider plugin. These plugins will help in optimizing the sliders as well as improve your site’s performance. One such faster slider plugin is the Soliloquy.

#16 You Must Disable Hotlinking

Hotlinking is a process through which different malicious websites can link to your website and its important elements such as images, content, videos, etc. Moreover, they are making use of the resources through your website. This increases bandwidth and slows down the page speed. If you want to avoid these things from your website, you need to alter a file present in your server account. This file is available in your cPanel under htaccess file. Besides this, you can contact your hosting provider who will be able to help you with this.

#17 You Must Make Use Of Lightweight Social Sharing Plugin

Well, we all know that social sharing is quite an essential marketing strategy for all websites. But this doesn’t mean that you have to make use of so many social sharing options. This will eventually slow down the website. Make use of Sharify Plugin (lightweight plugin), which will help you add a plethora of social share buttons to your WordPress website and also ensure that it does not affect the website speed. It enables caching that reduces server load, thereby proving faster access to content.

#19 Have You Implemented CSS Sprite?

CSS Sprites is considered the best when it comes to reducing the number of HTTP requests for the images that are referenced on your WordPress website. CSS Sprites are very useful as they enhance the speed of a website by combining all the website’s images into one file. So CSS Sprites can reduce the page load when there are too many images on a webpage. It will also increase the speed of the website.

#20 IncreasingThe Website Speed? Secure Your WordPress Website

Well, this is generally one of the most neglected technique when it comes to optimizing WordPress website speed. When you keep your website secure, you can ensure that there would be no malicious attack on the website. There are some unethical attacks such as brute force, denial of service, etc., which can get your site completely down in minutes. This in turn can make you lose all your customers within few seconds. So the security of the website is quite essential. Always keep the website alerts and notifications on, in-case if there are multiple spikes in your server load, you can easily identify it and investigate it.

#21 Make Use Of GTmetrix To Identify All The Website’s Speed Issues

When you have analyzed all the above points and made changes that help in improving the website, you must test your website through GTmetrix. It will help you in testing the speed and performance of your website. With the entire report, you get a detailed analysis of where your website is getting affected in terms of its loading time. Moreover, you would be provided with multiple solutions that will help you to make the necessary changes to correct any shortcomings.

Summary

These were the top 21 techniques that will help you to optimize your WordPress website in the best way. Optimizing the website’s speed is not only helpful in increasing website speed but also improves the website ranking in Google SERP – Search Engine Result Pages.

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