Website speed is an important aspect that website owners and webmasters need to pay attention to. Day by day, website visitors are growing impatient and website load times form a critical piece of the puzzle in the overall user journey and purchase cycle. Moreover, search engines like Google and Bing reward fast loading websites with higher ranks and better search visibility. Websites can be slow if they aren’t built or configured properly. However in case of WordPress based sites, there are services, plugins, and techniques out there to make your site lightning fast.
Today, we will take a look at a few of them.
Get Faster Hosting
The quest to improve your website’s speed starts with your hosting. The first thing you need to do as a WordPress website owner is move to WordPress Hosting. The benefit of WordPress Hosting is that it is configured to optimize security, speed, backups, WordPress updates, and scalability for hosting WordPress websites. Moreover, we at ResellerClub offer Cloud based WordPress Hosting plans and integrate them with advanced caching techniques like Varnish Caching. Get to know our WordPress hosting plans here.
Compress Images
Images are the heaviest elements on a page and more often than not, they are the primary reason for a slow website loading speed. It is essential to compress images before you go ahead and use them on your WordPress website. WordPress provides a plethora of useful plugins, you can use some of them to make image compression simple. One such plugin is smush image compression and optimization. This plugin allows you to resize, optimize,and compress all of your images and is absolutely free!
Avoid Installing too Many Plugins and Themes
Needless to say the phrase ‘too many’ is subjective. But it would be smart to only install plugins and themes that you will actually use. If you have too many plugins and themes installed, they add extra load to your WP-Database. The WP-Database holds all your important WordPress information and making it bulky will reduce the overall speed of your website. In our WordPress Hosting plans, we at ResellerClub also integrate WP-Database optimization which helps you keep your WP-Database lean and fast.
Compress Scripts and CSS Files
Based on the plugins and themes you setup on your WordPress website, it is likely to load and run several scripts and CSS files every time a user visits a page. This tends to make the web-page load slower. Minifying removes the “fluff” from those files, and merges multiple files for more efficient loading. Again, you can leverage the power of WordPress by integrating useful minification plugins such as Autoptimize. This plugin can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default (but can also defer), moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML. All this helps make the page lighter and faster.
Website speed is very essential to improve user experience and also do well on organic search visibility. It will also help get more return customers and increase the chances of people recommending your website to others. So try these simple things on your WordPress website and they will surely have a huge impact on your WordPress website speed! If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to share them in the comments section below!