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How to Improve Your WordPress Website Speed (5 Simple Ways)

Sep 6, 2023

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Slow site loading times could harm your business. A constant barrage of information have diminished the attention span of humans and have caused users to lose interest quicker than ever before.

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If your website takes time to load, prospective customers could simply click away.

It is good to know that there are excellent strategies that you can employ to increase your WordPress website's performance. Utilizing plugins, and following the guidelines can help improve the speed of your site and help keep the ever-changing visitors on your page.

In this post we'll examine five ways you can improve the speed of your WordPress speed. We'll also explore what slows down your site and why quick load times are essential. Let's begin!

What Slows Down Your WordPress website's performance? (And Why Speed is Important)

The time it takes to load your website is the amount of time it takes to show all of the content in its entirety. The content could include pictures, videos, and text-based elements.

The elements most likely to slow down your site include:

  • Images
  • Videos
  • Slow plug-ins
  • Caching is not working.
  • External scripts

This penalizes slow sites and pushes them further down the list of search results and makes it difficult for potential customers to locate your company.

It is possible to use a no-cost software such as the IsItWP speed tests to test the speed of your WordPress website's performance:

After you've established your base line, it is time to start making changes to speed up the loading time. You can also utilize this tool to perform tests as part of the updating process, to see which methods are most effective on your site.

What can you do to improve your WordPress Website's Speed (5 Easy Ways)

If you're aware of the significance of the WordPress site's speed is, let's take a look at the ways to speed up the loading of your website.

1. Pick the right theme and add-ons.

Themes and plugins play an important role as components of WordPress websites. However, poorly-designed themes and plugins could cause a significant slowdown to your website.

In selecting a new theme or plugin for your site, you'll need to:

  • Review user reviews and reviews. This can give an idea of how well the plugin or theme performs for other users.
  • Find out whether the theme or plugin has recently been updated. Tools that receive frequent updates from their creators are more stable and more likely to be optimized.
  • The staging site's performance before as well as after incorporating the new tool, to see whether there is any noticeable drops.

2. Improve Your Images

For reducing the effect of your media files, you can consider using an image optimizer such as the ShortPixel plug-in:

This plugin can be integrated with the WordPress website. It enables you to optimize pictures of all file types, including PNG as well as JPEG. It is very user-friendly, and you can compress all existing pictures on your site in a single click.

It is possible to make use of the ShortPixel plugin to optimize images by going to Media > Bulk ShortPixel > Optimize Now:

This bulk optimization tool can compress all the images in your WordPress library all at once.

There is another option to make use of "lazy loading". This will stop your site from showing pictures until a user is scrolling down until they reach the desired images. This speeds up loading times for the first time.

You can enable lazy loading with a plugin like Smush:

After installing the plugin, all you need to do is navigate towards the Smush menu > lazy load and then activate:

Once you activate lazy loading, you can customize various settings, including media types, exclusions, and the script's placement. Smush is also an excellent choice to compress and shrink images even if you do not use ShortPixel.

3. Utilize a Caching plugin (or Host with built-in Caching)

Caching is a crucial process to make your site load quickly. It creates and stores the site's content in a storage area known as a cache, so the entire website doesn't have to be reloaded with each new visitor. It can access these stored site information for new visitors, which means it will take much less time to load.

One of the simplest methods of caching your site is by using the plugin WordPress Super Cache. It employs a variety of ways, like simple static files designed for common users, and "super-cached" static documents for experts:

The WP Super Cache to store your site's data via the Settings tab, then WP Super Cache > Caching on:

In this dashboard, you can change your cache settings by navigating into the Advancedtab. You can select which users get cached content, what the caches will last and whether you want to allow expert delivery of caches.

This host's integrated caching is one of the most efficient available, which makes it by far the fastest WordPress web host available.

4. Utilize an Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers located around the world. Each of them stores a cache of your site's data whenever a person comes to your website they'll receive content from the CDN nearest to them. Your website is therefore able to be loaded much faster because there is less geographical distance.

There are many CDN alternatives available, including Cloudflare. Sign up to the paid subscription and then begin using this premium CDN for your website to bring it to your visitors quicker.

5. Utilize Excerpts

If you have blogs, you'll likely want to display the blog's content. The problem is that displaying blog posts in their entirety can slow down your website's speed. You can instead consider displaying excerpts of your content on the page's landing pages.

You can notice on the blog's homepage that it does not show the entire blog posts. It shows just a few paragraphs from each, and allows the visitor to select the headline for the full text:

In accordance with your theme you may need to change your settings so that excerpts are displayed through settings > reading > for each blog post, include > Summary:

After that, you are able to easily customize the excerpts of new posts by going to the Posts tab and clicking Add New. Within this page, you can click on the Post tab and select Excerpt:

There, you can compose a custom-written excerpt which can be displayed instead of the complete article. Additionally, you can insert excerpts into already published posts.

Conclusion

The slow loading of your website can be disastrous for your business. If visitors leave your site they could be missing out on opportunities for conversions. So, optimizing your WordPress site's speed is one of the most crucial aspects you can accomplish.

To recap, these are some ways that you can boost your WordPress performance:

  1. Cut down on the size of your images by using the ShortPixel plug-in, and consider lazy loading.
  2. Make use of the Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare to reduce loading time.
  3. Utilize post excerpts to increase loading speed.

Have you got any concerns regarding how you can improve your WordPress site's performance? Please let us know via the comments section below!

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