Are you one of those developers who are looking for ways to improve the speed of the WordPress website? A fast loading WordPress website can improve user experience, increase the number of page views, and also assist the WordPress SEO. One of the most commonly reported problems with any WordPress website is its loading time, or in other words, it’s speed.

The low speed of websites can have adverse effects on the business. How would you determine whether the speed of your WordPress Website is optimal or not? Suppose your website conversions are low, despite receiving a good amount of traffic, it’s probably an indication of how slow your website’s loading time is or maybe there is another issue. But for boosting the speed of your WordPress website, you need to optimize it.

Why Speed Is An Important Factor For Any Website?

The speed of your WordPress website is the most important factor that helps in determining the performance (the performance is calculated in terms of the number of visitors coming to the website and actually engaging themselves). It is easy to understand that if the website takes ages to load, then the users would lose interest and move to another website offering the same services or products. Well, who likes to wait? Various studies and surveys have shown that humans have a very small attention span, and it has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds.

This means that website owners do not have much time to show users their content and engage them in the website. If your website is taking time to load, it will lead to a loss in conversions, loss in page views, and increase customer dissatisfaction which in turn hits the revenue. The numerical data shows that website speed plays a vital role in determining the success of your website.

#1 You Must Opt For A High-Performance WordPress Hosting

One of the most important things that influence the speed of your WordPress Website is your hosting. You must choose a WordPress host for your WordPress website. It provides storage for all the website data such as content, images, videos, etc. Moreover, the WordPress host gives you an easy way to access the data, manage it, and route it to your visitors.

There are different types of WordPress Hosting. You must choose the right one for your website. It’s important you choose the right one from the beginning, otherwise, you’ll simply cause yourself headaches and wasted time down the road.

• Shared WordPress Hosting
• VPS WordPress Hosting
• Managed WordPress Hosting

#2 You Must Focus On Using A Lightweight WordPress Themes

WordPress platform offers a huge collection of themes. These WordPress themes have several dynamic components such as sliders, widgets, social media icons, and other elements that are quite appealing. But to maintain the optimal speed of the WordPress website, you must choose a lightweight theme that is beautiful as well as serves the purpose. Having too many components in the theme would cause a web server to take a thumping. You can choose to go with the default WordPress theme or try some other lightweight themes.

• A fast lightweight WordPress theme that is built with only the features you need, nothing more.
• If you still want to select a rich WordPress theme for your website, you can select that and then disable the features that you don’t need.

Some lightweight WordPress themes are:

• GeneratePress
• OceanWP
• Astra

Everybody loves a brand new WordPress theme, but you must be careful before you go out and grab the one with all the new shiny features. In the theme, every element you see has some impact on the overall speed of your website.

#3 To Maintain The Speed Of The WordPress Website

Reduce The Image Sizes: High-resolution images are the major contributors to increasing the size of the webpage. But the most important point that you need to consider is to reduce the size of the images without compromising on the quality.

You can opt for manually optimizing the images using Chrome PageSpeed Insights extension or Photoshop or any other tools. But you must know that these processes would be time-consuming. But don’t worry, you can make use of a wide range of plugins for image optimization. The ones worth mentioning are:

• Optimole
• WP Smush
• EWWW Image Optimizer

These are some of the best plugins on your WordPress site that will drastically reduce image sizes, thus improving the speed of your website.

Optimize The WordPress Website Settings: Making settings on your WordPress website would help you to increase the speed of your website. You might think that these are very subtle changes, but they help you a lot.

Optimize The WordPress Login URL: Why do you need to change the WordPress default login URL? The default login URL remains the same for all the users – domain.com/wp-admin/, this makes it easier for the bots and hackers to target your website for malicious activities. By customizing your URL, you are protecting yourself from being targeted.

But how changing the URL helps in decreasing the page load? Well, when you customize your URL, it helps in preventing some common errors such as “Too Many Requests” or “Bad Request”. This small step can decrease the overall load on the page.

You Should Limit The Number Of Posts On Your Blog Feed: Have you ever thought how the number of your blogs on a page can affect the speed of your WordPress website? Whether your blog’s feed is set on the homepage or a specific blog page, whenever it loads, it will load all the 50 to 60 thumbnails together. This will drastically reduce the page speed of the website.

Moreover, if your website receives a traffic-influx, you should focus on reducing the number of blog thumbnails you display on a single page. (You can make use of pagination). In simple words, the fewer requests and media, the better in terms of performance.

Summary:

Optimizing your website is no longer an option but a necessity. The search engines are determining the performance of the website based on the speed of web pages. Due to this, it is vital to your website’s success to have fast loading web pages. Sometimes, a lot of people wrongly assume that you need to be an expert to optimize a WordPress website. But it is not so. WordPress optimization is not rocket science.

Anybody with a working knowledge of WordPress can do it. 99% of the optimization of your website can be done by following the good practices and taking advantage of caching and content delivery networks. So there you have it. All the possible ways in which you can optimize your WordPress website so that it loads and performs faster than ever!