How to Speed Up WordPress Site in (2023)?
A Complete Guide to Increasing Page Load Speed:
In order to ensure that a website loads quickly and provides the best user experience, it is essential to optimize its performance. A website can offer faster load times and significantly improved performance by lowering the quantity of website resources, enabling caching, optimizing server setups, introducing CDNs, and minimizing the number of HTTP requests. All these can increase user engagement and commercial success.
What is website speed optimization?
The process of enhancing a website’s overall performance and loading speed is known as website speed optimization. To speed up page loads, reduce HTTP requests, and optimize website files and graphics, numerous methods and strategies are used. A website that loads quickly enhances user experience, search engine rankings, conversion rates, and bounce rates.
Making use of caching and CDN services, optimizing website files and graphics, utilizing a lightweight theme, and limiting HTTP requests are all examples of optimization techniques.
Why is your WordPress Site so Slow?
Compared to static sites, e-commerce and online store websites (dynamic sites) frequently experience the worst server resource hogging and slowdowns.
Dynamic websites are ones that have a lot of actions occurring at once with many website elements updating periodically, such as throngs of users claiming discounts, perusing a replacement inventory, and learning on an eCommerce website.
There are several reasons why a WordPress site may be slow. Here are some of the most common reasons:
- Hosting: One of the most common reasons for a slow WordPress site is poor-quality hosting. If your website is hosted on a low-quality or shared hosting plan, it may not have enough resources to handle the traffic and demands of your site. Upgrading to a better hosting plan can help improve site speed.
- Large Images: Large images can slow down your site, especially if they’re not optimized for the web. Make sure to compress and resize images before uploading them to your site. You can also use a plugin to optimize images automatically.
- Plugins: Plugins can add functionality to your site, but they can also slow it down. Some plugins may be poorly coded or use a lot of resources, causing your site to load slowly. Consider removing any unnecessary plugins and replacing them with lightweight alternatives.
- Theme: Your WordPress theme can also affect site speed. Some themes are poorly coded or contain a lot of unnecessary features, which can slow down your site. Consider switching to a lightweight, fast-loading theme.
- Caching: WordPress caching plugins can help speed up your site by storing static copies of your content. If you don’t have a caching plugin installed, consider installing one.
- Updates: Keeping WordPress, plugins, and themes up to date is important for security and performance. Make sure to update your site regularly to take advantage of the latest improvements and bug fixes.
How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site
1. Run performance tests:
Depending on the quantity and nature of the material on each page of your website, page speed will also change. Website homepages are commonly used to measure load times, but you should also test any other pages that receive a lot of traffic.
2. Ask Your Cloud Hosting Provider
Before taking any action, inquire with your WordPress managed hosting provider about their services and WordPress compatibility. They can advise you on how to make your WordPress site load faster. Using this, you can easily optimize WordPress speed while saving time. Learn why Cloud Ways is the best hosting service alternative.
3. Install an Effective Caching Plugin
One of the most popular ways to increase your site’s speed is by using a cache plugin. For any future visitors, a caching plugin will save the most recent version of your website. As a result, WordPress won’t need to generate it for each subsequent visitor to the website. These files may contain Flash files, pictures, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code.
4. latest version of PHP
PHP is the scripting language that is utilized by all WordPress websites. As a server-side language, it is executed and stored by the web server of your website. PHP occasionally makes updates to run more efficiently, just like themes and plugins do, which speeds up the loading of your pages.
The most recent stable version of PHP is 7, which was released in 2015. Running your website on PHP 7, which offers a substantial performance improvement over PHP 6, is essentially impossible. See our guide to PHP 7 in WordPress for details on how to manually check and upgrade the PHP version on your website.
5. A lightweight theme
Themes that include many high-quality images and effects may look appealing, but they are costly. Many themes have inefficient coding, and elaborate effects can require a lot of code, which slows down your page’s speed and increases file sizes.
Choose a theme with only the functions your websites actually require. You may always use plugins or special CSS to add more effects in the future if you’d like. By browsing our selection of suggested WordPress themes, you can get started with your search.
6. Compress Media Files
Very large picture and video uploads will cause your WordPress site to load much more slowly. Compressing your media files is a different way to speed up a WordPress site because of this.
7. lazy loading your content
Lazy loading gives the impression that your website will load more fast since your content loads gradually rather than needing your browser to finish the loading process all at once. In addition to photos, the approach of lazy loading can be applied to text, comments, video embeds, and other website content. Check out our selection of image plugins that load images slowly to get started.
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8. Optimize Your WordPress site’s Homepage
Optimizing your homepage is another thing you can do to make your WordPress site load faster. Make it appear more straightforward by removing clumps of text and pointless tools.
Furthermore, don’t display the posts in their entirety. Only the opening sentence or a select passage from the text can be displayed. Too many posts are being shown on one page at once could cause a longer loading time as well.
9. Update Update Update
WordPress should always be updated. Whether they are plugins or themes, keep in mind that they are always current. If a new patch is available, try testing each update on a WordPress staging site before applying it to a live site.
10. CSS and JavaScript file sizes
These details, however, need to be sent from your web server to a web browser each time a visitor accesses a page. Hence, the quicker your pages load, the smaller you may make these files without degrading the look and usefulness of your website.
To do this, use the Auto optimize WordPress plugin, which is free. It will examine your CSS and JavaScript files, clean up any superfluous code (such as comments and whitespace), and compress the files to make them load more quickly.