Optimizing WordPress Performance: Strategies to Improve Speed and Loading Times
Optimizing WordPress Performance: Increasing the WordPress site page speed can help you in various ways. It can make your site’s users happy; search engines prefer websites with high page load speeds, and your profit can improve. However, WordPress itself can’t ignite the page speed to please visitors.
But here is good news for you!
Different tools and ways are available to boost the WordPress site’s performance. You can implement these methods quickly. However, it needs a bit of hard work from your side. In this blog post, we have covered the techniques and tools for optimizing the page speed of a WordPress site. But first, let’s find out why it is essential to speed up the WordPress site:
The Importance of Optimizing WordPress Performance
Page speed and user experience are two major factors in rating a website’s performance. User experience is directly related to page speed, so there is little to no margin of error here.
Moreover, according to Google, a website should be opened within two seconds. Any time longer than two seconds causes users to close the website. Page performance is also a key factor for search engines like Google when ranking a website. The faster a website is, the more likely it is to get a better position in the SERPs.
Seven Strategies to Improve Speed and Loading Times
1. Consider Image Optimization
Keeping heavy images is another obstacle to WordPress page speed optimization. To increase the WordPress website’s performance, you need to compress the size of your image files without compromising the image quality. Your major objective is to save storage space and ensure users don’t avoid seeing your visuals.
You can use some tools to compress the size of image files. These include Photoshop, Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer, etc.
2. Install a Caching Plugin
The WordPress site’s speed is often choked due to issues related to how webpages are assembled on the server.
When a visitor sends a request on a webpage from a non-cached website, the WordPress server’s PHP needs to retrieve all relevant content from your WP database, assemble it into the HTML file, and send it back to the client. This method offers different benefits, including allowing dynamic web content and saving server space. However, this method requires a lot of time.
A caching plugin such as LiteSpeed Cache simplifies the whole process. The plugin develops all HTML pages with PHP on your website and then saves every HTML page sent to upcoming visitors upon request. When you skip the building and development part, the website’s content reaches the visitors quickly, and page speed automatically increases.
3. Delete Redundant Plugins
Quality always supersedes quantity when we talk about WordPress plugins. Every plugin is like a mini-program; too many plugins running in the background can hurt a WordPress site’s page speed. Even if a plugin is unused for a long time, it will still perform unnecessary functions and consume resources in the background. So, you need to find those and cut them back.
You can delete unused WP Plugins by deactivating them and ensuring you won’t use them in the foreseeable future. Also, do a test run after deactivating every plugin and delete those after satisfying that everything works perfectly. Replace the deleted plugins with lightweight ones.
4. Install High-Quality Plugins Only
After taking care of the quantity by uninstalling redundant plugins, it’s time to ensure you have all the high-quality plugins. The optimum WordPress plugins are those that are written with code that needs fewer server resources when they are required. The codes also take up less space on the server and are often updated along with the WordPress core.
The ideal way to ensure your remaining plugins are seamless and performance-oriented is to cross-check the plugins’ credentials with recommended lists. The list oversees how the WordPress plugin developer develops and maintains each plugin. Before installing new plugins, consider online reviews and check whether users have any significant complaints about them. After checking, re-do the test run to ensure the page speed stays uncompromised.
5. Think About a Lightweight Theme
Like plugins, WP themes can be another factor slowing your website on the web server. WordPress themes with high-quality photos and effects may appear appealing but expensive. Fancy theme effects require heavy coding, while many themes have inefficient programming. So, a lot of coding and ineffective programming can negatively impact your website’s performance.
Choose a basic theme with the features essential for your web pages for optimal page speed. You can always add other themes later through custom CSS or plugins.
6. Avoid Video Hosting on Your Server
Video files are the most resource-intensive files a web hosting server can store. Videos consume a lot of space and thus slow down the page speed. Loading one large Video can negatively impact the website’s performance.
However, videos are always a powerful tool for a website’s performance in terms of user engagement. You can use outsourced hosting services like Wistia, Vimeo, or YouTube to expand your website’s media library by uploading videos. These 3rd-party services take care of your storage; you only need to keep the Video on your webpage by entering the embed code. It will make zero difference, and your user experience will massively improve.
7. Reduce the Size of JavaScript and CSS Files
File sizes for JavaScript and CSS are necessary for your website. They go beyond plain HTML walls to improve your web pages. These files are sent from your web server to your browser whenever the visitor loads a page. So, the smaller the file size, the faster your web pages will load without affecting how they work or look.
So, to reduce the file sizes of JavaScript and CSS, you need to have a WordPress plugin called Autoptimize. Autoptimize scans delete unnecessary JavaScript and CSS files and codes and suppress the files without lag.
Last Word: Optimizing WordPress Performance
Speed optimization is among your responsibilities, similar to other diverse aspects of running a WordPress site. Thankfully, you have different strategies to implement to optimize your page load time and offer the speediest and most satisfying user experience. It takes time and effort to save loads of time for your visitors.
