9 Tips to Speed Up a WordPress Website?

Websites tend to play a crucial role in setting up brand authenticity. They inform the target audience and are a method to reach your consumers without any third party being involved directly. With the advancement of technology, various businesses build an aesthetically pleasing website for increased consumer retention and generating traffic. Various developers code manually, but specific content management systems provide a more accessible approach to building any good website.

WordPress is one of the platforms that can be easily used when you’re an amateur in the field of development. There are also templates on the platform for better insight into what kind of theme you are looking for. It can be used to your benefit to the fullest if you have basic coding knowledge. It can be holey customized according to the user’s choices. It has been researched that around 64.8% of the websites whose development and management system of content is known, of which about 41.4% users tend to use WordPress for better delivery and visual.

As necessary for business owners and developers to create a versatile and good-looking website, it is also necessary for the website to run and function smoothly without any errors or bugs. Research has shown that an average user spends about 1.5 minutes on any website. Unfortunately, if your website doesn’t load quickly, the user will exit and try finding options on the SERP. Hence, any developer must enhance their website speed using the right tools.

There are various reasons that state why you should be speeding up your WordPress website. They include a better ranking on the search engine result pages. In addition, improving the speed of your website may result in improving the website’s authenticity by ranking it at the top of the results page.

Apart from that, studies have shown that if any website takes more than 2 seconds to load, then about 49% of users tend to bounce off. Therefore, it will help if you increase your website speed. Especially for E-Commerce businesses, website loading is a crucial aspect for their potential customers to come and buy quickly. 

It is a fast-paced world, and along with the physical world, the digital world is expected to be faster. Hence, developers should analyze the website’s load time and then make changes on the page accordingly for better results. The speed analysis may differ based on the size of the page, how many requests are generated on the page, if the cache is cleared or not and what type of content has been used on that particular page. The homepage is usually the standard page set for testing the website’s loading time.

Here are a Few Ways to Speed up Your WordPress Website:

Using a Lighter Theme:

Using too many elements, sliders, dynamics, icons, and fancy elements increases the website’s data load. No doubt, they would be visually appealing but might also fall to the drawback of making the website heavier, and hence it might not load quickly. The higher the page size, the more loading time it takes. The best option here would be utilizing lighter themes or icons to showcase the type of originality that you’re trying to portray through your website.

Efficient Hosting Provider

This is one of the significant factors that impact the speed of your WordPress website. Even though it might seem like a good idea to purchase a shared host that provides unlimited bandwidth at a lower price for space, domains, and whatnot, usually shared hosts do not provide good loading quality.

It has been seen that about 99% of shared hosts do not provide good speed at the peak traffic hours of the website. This happens because the server space is shared with various other websites that take service from the same host. Cloud hosting is a better match for your website’s speed goals. You can get desired platforms at an affordable rate, even though setting them up is a huge task.

Reduced Image Sizes

Images or videos also contribute to the webpage getting heavier while loading. Here’s a hack for you! You can use images without compromising the quality but reduce the size of the images. Using manual tools to reduce the size can be a time-consuming process. Instead, specific online tools come into use for the same task.

Minimize the size of JS and CSS files

When you run your website to analyze and gain insights into the pages, you might get notified about minimizing the size of your CSS files. Reducing the count of CSS and JS calls can improve the process of the loading time of your website. You can go through the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to get apt suggestions.

Enabling compression of GZIP

When you compress many files on your computer, it’ll help you save a lot of space on your disk. Similarly, when you compress your web files on GZIP, it’ll speed up the loading process of the website. This strategy will reduce the bandwidth of the usage on the website and automatically help you reduce the bandwidth usage to a great extent. Some manual fixing can also be done to work around the WordPress themes. There are also specific plugins available to help you achieve your target.

Clean up the Database

Cleaning up the unnecessary files from the code may also enhance the speed of the page by not making it heavy—the minimum amount of content on the page, the better. Deleting unnecessary content, users or plugins may act as a benefit to speed up your PSD to WordPress template website’s pages.

CDN Usage is a Must

With a broad demographic comes an audience from different parts of the world. For that benefit, Content Delivery Networks are necessary for managing the smooth loading of the site. Using a system as such helps you maintain a database of the audiences, and hence you have a list of interested audiences maintained from all around the world. The functionality of a CDN includes the webpage to obtain a visitor or user as remotely as possible.

Minimalize External Scripts

Using unnecessary scripts outside the webpage might include too much pressure and load. Of course, installing necessary APIs is a good practice, but avoiding the use of external scripts holds the benefit of better speed of the page’s loading.

I am not Enabling Pingbacks and Trackbacks.

Pingbacks and trackbacks are systems that help the website notify when their content has been published on some other websites when found intriguing. This is a good practice to know that your website is being engaged with and observed, but responding and keeping such links in the code might increase the load on the web pages.

It generates requests on your WordPress again and again whenever your page or any link is being mentioned on some other pages. Therefore, it is necessary to disable them to reduce the loading time of your webpage. Keeping pingbacks and trackbacks on your web page will account for the unnecessary load on the webpage, and there is also a possibility of a cyber attack. Hence, practising disabling pingbacks and backtracks is an essential trait.

Nowadays, dynamic websites are preferred over static ones. Consumers want to feel an entire out-of-the-world experience while visiting any website. To fulfil that kind of visuals and aesthetics, developers must implement such elements that aren’t heavy but also apt, which can be a task.

They have to make sure that every aspect runs smooth and has no error, to deliver a website like never seen before. Furthermore, reducing the website’s loading time can act as a catalyst for the brand to gain more visitors and improve their visit experience into higher retention. 

The website should be mobile optimized for generating more traffic through mobile phones, as most users tend to operate phones than personal computers. Cache-free, reduced image size, minimal external scripts, and such aspects can also improve the website’s rankings on the Search Engine Results Page. 

These tips will help both you and your client generate a website that runs smoothly. The reduction in the bandwidth of the usage of your hosting channel and faster loading of the website from the client’s server will be beneficial for better results on the SERPs. Not only do they make your website efficient, but they generate traffic, increase page views and boost the performance of your website on the search engine.

Autus Digital Agency is your first choice for all your requirements and queries related to PSD to WordPress theme or website development. Connect with us for more ideas on how to speed up your website. Call 929-357-3255!