How to Optimize the Speed of Your WordPress Website
March 9th, 2022
WordPress alone powers over 43% of the web. As a frequent user of WordPress, it can be frustrating when your website starts lagging and you cannot troubleshoot the problem. Most search engines rank websites with a fast-loading time, and a slow-loading webpage can put you at a disadvantage. A speed of more than two seconds will also result in about half of the visitors bouncing off your site, which can significantly hinder your progress. You can check the loading speed of your site using the Web speed test by Sitechecker. This tool will show you all the problems that affect the loading speed and provide you with a list of tips to fix the problems found.
If you plan to grow and sustain your website and improve your position in the SERPs, you should prioritize enhancing your speed. Here are four ways to optimize the speed of your WordPress website:
1. Choose a Better Web Hosting Service
Your hosting service is a tool that highly influences your website’s speed. You might be tempted to host your new website through a shared hosting provider, which may seem like a cost-effective option that offers you unlimited bandwidth, domain, space, and emails. However, shared hosting environments usually fail to deliver a fast loading time, especially during peak hours. A shared hosting service might also lead to poor performance, as you will be sharing similar server space with numerous other websites. Your hosting service will have higher loading times due to increased workload from other websites and a higher risk of bugs and cyberattacks. As a result, it is important to sign up for exclusive hosting services, such as VPS hosting, to boost your website’s speed.
2. Use a Lightweight WordPress Theme
WordPress themes that include numerous dynamic elements like widgets, sliders, or even social media icons can be eye-catching, but adding too many of these features and increasing page size will cause your web server to slow down. Instead, keep your WordPress theme minimalistic and free from visual clutter.
3. Compress Your Images
Images can contribute to the size increment of your WordPress webpage. To counteract this, reduce your image size while sustaining the image quality. Some tools that can help you achieve this goal are Chrome PageSpeed Insights extension or Photoshop and even image optimization plugins.
4. Unwanted Clean Database
Consistently deleting unnecessary data can help you optimize your server’s speed. It will reduce the size of backups and keep the overall database to a minimum size. It would be best to consider deleting any spam comments, old drafts that are no longer relevant, fake users, and unwanted plugins. These measures will decrease the size of your database and increase the speed at which web files are loaded. This database optimization will also reduce QA overhead for your WordPress website and create a win-win situation for you.
Endnote
As a web creator, your main mission is to make quality content. Unfortunately, sometimes we tend to risk loading speed in the process of doing so. These methods, including changing your hosting services, optimizing your theme choice, reducing image sizes, and investing in valuable digital tools for your WordPress website can tackle all these hurdles for you. As a result, your web page’s quality and speed will thrive with just some minor changes, which can set up exponential growth of your WordPress website.
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Comments
I’ve deleted several plugins, just for the sake of speed, although they are great plugins but website speed also matters. As a website owner, you have to take care of everything that matters to the visitor of your website.