How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site in 5 Steps
WordPress site running slower than expected? Learn how to speed up your WordPress site in 5 steps right here.
Image Source: WPEngine
If you manage a WordPress site, chances are you’ve seen it get slower after install. Want to know how to speed up your WordPress site? This post has 5 great tips.
Top 5 Must-Know Steps to Increase Your WordPress Site’s Speed
As one of the most well-known platforms worldwide, professionals pay lots of attention and effort to maximize the WordPress experience for their business or clients.
One of the most challenging actions to consider is speeding up the website and making it more user-friendly. Follow these five tips from experts of managed IT services Alpharetta to increase your site’s performance.
What is WordPress, and why is it vital in this digital age?
WordPress is a free and open-source CMS to create websites, blogs, and other online content.
In three words, we would highlight hosting, theme, and plugins.
Finally, use Google Analytics to track visitor data and improve your website performance in real-time.
How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site
It would be best to make a few simple changes to achieve the most outstanding results in the site’s optimization. Thanks to the tips listed below, you will surely speed up your WordPress site and make it more user-friendly.
1: Hosting Provider
One of the most basic efforts you can make to speed up your WordPress site is to use a professional WordPress hosting provider. A good host will provide you with optimized WordPress code and security measures to make your site faster and easier to manage.
Why? Hosting is a big part of your website’s speed.
We recommend that you host with reputable companies and read reviews before going for the cheapest option, as this will cost more in the long run.
Hosting your website on a shared hosting provider that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, space, and emails might look like a golden shot. However, this may be far from the ideal thing.
If you aspire to fast page loading, you should choose other hosting methods. Shared hosting providers deliver poor services during peak hours when users work on their websites simultaneously.
2: WordPress Theme
The first thing after WP installment is downloading a lightweight theme for your WP site. It will improve your site’s loading time. WordPress themes with too many active components can slow down your webserver. This is where most WordPress users run into issues. Most WordPress sites run a page builder component. This is essential, because it makes site management easy, but it adds a lot of weight to the site making it run much slower.
In our experience, when a website has more than two or three items on the page that move in different ways (like sliders), it becomes difficult for visitors to load all content.
What might seem very attractive might hide some issues that complicate a user’s navigation within the site. People navigate from different devices, so prepare to provide a smooth experience to everyone.
Look at the speed of loading for each page on your website. Ensure that it’s fast enough and check if there are any bugs by using available testing tools online.
3: Uninstall Insignificant Plugins but Use Caching
One of the best steps to speed up your WordPress site is to uninstall unimportant plugins, comments, and themes. Unimportant plugins and themes might take up functional space on the server, decreasing your site’s speed.
Another imperative note to increase your WP site’s speed is to install a caching plugin. They store copies of pages on your server for immediate access and facilitate the loading time of your WP site.
Many caching plugins are available, so it is essential to choose one compatible with your WordPress settings. You can also employ a caching plugin for pictures, JavaScript, and CSS files.
Using a caching plugin, you can speed up your WordPress site by up to 80%.
4: Small Sizes for Images
One of the most typical errors website owners make is uploading large images. This takes up space on your site, but it also slows down your site.
To speed up your site, reduce the size of your images. You can do this by using image compression software or reducing the resolution of your photos.
By reducing the resolution of your pictures, you will save bandwidth and storage space, which will speed up your site.
Optimizing images for faster load times is time-consuming and can be difficult without the right tools. Fortunately, there are free plugins to download and solve all issues you might have.
Otherwise, be careful in choosing the right plugin to reduce your image size without lowering its quality.
5: Minify Files
One of the most efficient actions to enhance your WordPress site’s velocity is to minify your JavaScript and CSS files. Minifying these files drastically reduces the size of the file, which in turn speeds up your site.
You can use the specific plugins to cover such a part to minify your files. You can work with free plugins from the WordPress plugin repository for both CSS and Javascript files.
Once you have installed one of these plugins, you need to enter the filename of your JavaScript or CSS file into the plugin’s input box and hit “minify.” After minification is complete, you will be able to see the file’s size reduced by a significant amount.
PRO TIP:
There are many plugins that can help address each of these points. One thing that you might find is that installing individual plugins ie: one for images, one for minification, etc. will create conflicts. One recommendation is to use one great 3rd party service to handle all of these issues. Check out NitroPack.
Conclusion
WordPress is one of the most famous CMS worldwide. It’s effortless to work with and quite customizable to fit your preferences and needs.
If you want to know how to speed up your WordPress site, these 5 simple tips are fast and easy to implement on your own without the help of a developer.
First, conduct some research and choose the best hosting provider.
Second, clean your site from within with unnecessary plugins and polish it from spam in the comments. Remember to install a caching plugin to speed up your site.
Finally, keep your WordPress site updated for accurate and contemporary content. Keeping your site updated will also reduce the loading time of your website.
