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6 Tips on How to Make Your WordPress Website Faster

When you decide to start your own website, one of the most important things is the website speed. The first impression when someone lands on your website is crucial for capturing their attention and making them stay on your site.

Longer load speed can result in traffic loss and lower ranking on Google/Bing.  By the latest results from Microsoft, Bing, 2-second longer delay in page will lower user satisfactionby 3.8%, as well as reduce revenue per user by 4.3% and lower clicks by the same amount.

You have to value the time of the visitors and if they wait a bit longer they are usually gone and they can hardly return to your website. In this article, we will examine how to fix this issue and make your WordPress website faster.

1. Choose reliable host

The step before creating your website is choosing the right host for you. At first sight, most of the hosts will seem like a bargain with all the unlimited page views and domains. However, it comes at a cost that will affect your website speed. Mostly cheap hosting packages are shared ones, which mean that you will share your server space with other users.

Make sure you pick a hosting company that is already proven and can offer support 24/7. WP Engine is one of the reliable hosting companies, which proves the fact why so many giant companies and organizations use it. The National Football League (NFL) has partneredwith WordPress VIP program hosting just recently making a stable connection with your server at all times, so you will be able to enjoy the NFL preseason scheduleat remarkable speed.

Investing in your hosting package is very important for the speed of your website, which is why you will be better off spending a bit more in order to build a fast website.

2. Theme

Applying solid framework or theme might make or break your website. That is why you must build a solid framework which is the base of your website, or if you don’t know how to build your theme, you can buy really good premium themes which can cost from $40-$150. Make sure your theme does not have any unnecessary plugins or options that will slow the load speed of your website.

If you decide to edit the coding of the theme you bought, make sure you know what you are doing. Any wrong coding can harm the speed of your website.

3. Caching Plugin

Since you are running your website on WordPress, your first priority should be installing an effective caching plugin. This can drastically improve the speed of your website, loading cached elements very fast. There are many caching plugins available, but W3 Total Cache is the choice for most WordPress users. This plugin does not require any knowledge to install and it is very easy to use.

4. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Many blogs use the advantage of a content delivery network in order to reduce load times. Essentially, CDN takes all the static files you’ve got on your site such as JavaScript, CSS, Images and etc. and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.

Since you incorporate CDN, and users download all the data from your website, they can access the website at incredible speed.

5. Optimization of images

This is another important step, especially for websites that have a lot of media such as images, videos, logos, etc. The media is the largest stored data on your website and they take most of the loading time on your websites. That is why you must optimize the size of the images automatically which will make the optimization process very easy. There are a lot of plugins that can offer media optimization such as WP-SmushIt and Squash, which are designed to manage your website automatically by reducing the size of images remaining the same quality.

6. Homepage Optimization

Your homepage is where most of the visitors will land, that is why the loading speed of your homepage is important. As we mentioned before, simple is better. Make sure you don’t add million unnecessary widgets on your website that will only slow down your website. You should add excerpts instead of full posts reduce the number of posts on the first page, remove any inactive plugins and unnecessary sharing widgets.

These are some of the basic tips to use in order to improve loading speeds of your website. By using the tips mentioned before you will be able to attract first-time visitors and make them stay longer on your website. There are many things you can do in order to improve the speed of your blog, but the basic rule that you must always remember is to keep it minimal.