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What You Can Do to Improve Your WordPress Website Speed (5 Easy Ways)

Sep 6, 2023

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The slow loading of websites will negatively impact your company. A constantly flooded with information has diminished the attention span of humans which means that users are bored faster than they have ever.

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If your site takes too lengthy to load, potential customers may simply move on to another site.

Fortunately, there are some great strategies you can use to boost the speed of your WordPress website's performance. Utilizing plugins, and following the best practices can improve the speed of your site and help keep your visitors visiting your website.

In this article, we'll look at five ways you can improve the speed of your WordPress site speed. Also, we'll look at how slowing down your website can be, and why fast loading times are so critical. Let's begin!

What Slows Down Your WordPress website's speed? (And the reason why speed is important)

Time to load a website refers to the amount of time it takes for your website to fully display the content. The content could include pictures video, text, or other components.

Some of the elements that could slow your site down include:

  • Images
  • Videos
  • The slow plugins
  • Inadequate caching
  • External scripts

This penalizes slow sites and pushes them further down the search results list and makes it difficult for potential customers to locate your business.

You can use a free software such as that of the IsItWP speed test to test your WordPress website's performance.

When you have a baseline, you can begin making tweaks to improve loading times. You can also make use of this tool to conduct tests as part of the updating process to determine which strategies are most effective on your site.

How to Improve Your WordPress Website's Speed (5 Steps to Take)

Once you've realized how important the speed of your WordPress website's speed is, let's take a look at the ways to reduce your site's loading time.

1. Pick your theme and plugins carefully

Themes and plugins play an important role as components of WordPress websites. They are the primary components. But, poorly-designed themes or plugins can slow down your site significantly.

When selecting a new theme or plugin for your website, you'll want to

  • Check out user ratings and reviews. This can give you an insight into how well the plugin or theme performs for other users.
  • Find out if the theme or plugin has been updated recently. Tools that receive regular updates from the developers are more stable and likely to be better optimized.
  • It is possible to test the performance of the staging site before and after the addition of the instrument, and see if there are any significant decreases.

2. Optimize Your Images

In order to reduce the impact of your media files' impact You can think about using an image optimizer similar to the ShortPixel plugin:

This plugin integrates into your WordPress site. It allows you to improve images of most file types, including PNG and JPEG. It is very user-friendly, and you can compress all images on your website with a single click.

It is possible to utilize this ShortPixel plugin to make images more efficient through the Media tab, then Bulk ShortPixel > Begin Optimizing:

This bulk optimization tool can reduce all images within your WordPress library all at once.

There is another option to use "lazy loading". This option prevents your website from showing images until the user is scrolling down until they reach the images. This helps to speed up loading times for the first time.

You can enable lazy loading by using the help of a plugin such as Smush:

After you've installed the plugin all you have to do is navigate through the Smush menu > lazy load > activate:

Once you activate lazy loading, you are able to modify various settings such as the types of media, exclusions and script placements. Smush is also an excellent choice to compress and shrink images, even without using ShortPixel.

3. Use a Caching Plugin (or an Host that has Built-In Caching)

Caching is a vital procedure that helps your website load faster. The process creates and stores duplicates of your website within a place called a cache. This means that the whole website does not have to reload with every new visitor. The server can retrieve these stored site information for the first time, meaning it's much quicker to load.

One of the easiest ways to cache your site is to use an application like WP Super Cache. It employs a variety of ways, like simple static files for general users as well as "super-cached" static documents for expert users:

The the WP Super Cache to save your site's details through Settings > WP Super Cache > Caching on:

In this dashboard, you are able to modify your cache settings, by going into the Advancedtab. You can select the users who are able to access cached content, as well as how long the caches are able to last, and if you wish to make sure that your caches are delivered by an expert.

Its internal caching feature is the best on the market, making it by far the fastest WordPress website host out there.

4. Make use of the Content Delivery Network (CDN)

An Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a group of servers scattered across the world. Each server stores a copy of data for your site as well as when a visitor visits your page they'll receive information from the CDN that is closest to them. So your website will run faster due to the fact that there's less geographic distance.

There are numerous CDN choices available, such as Cloudflare. Sign up to the paid subscription and then begin using this premium CDN to deliver your site to visitors faster.

5. Utilize Excerpts

If you have a blog, then you probably want to showcase your content. But, showing the blog's entire content can slow down your website's speed. You can instead look into displaying excerpts from your content on your landing pages.

For example, you can see on the blog home page that it does not display blog the entire blog posts. It shows just a few paragraphs from each, and enables the user to simply click the title for the full text:

Depending on your theme, you might need to modify your settings so that excerpts are displayed by navigating to the Settings menu > Reading for each blog post Include > Summary:

You can then easily customize the excerpts of newly published posts by going to the Posts tab and clicking Add New. Within this page it is possible to click the Post tab and select Excerpt:

In this section, you are able to compose a custom-written excerpt which can be displayed instead of the entire blog. It is also possible to insert excerpts into existing posts.

Conclusion

Slow loading websites can ruin your business. If visitors leave your site and leave, you may miss chances to increase conversions. So, optimizing your WordPress website's speed is among of the most vital aspects you can accomplish.

To recap, these are some ways that to improve your WordPress performance:

  1. Reducing the size of your image files through the ShortPixel plug-in Also, think about lazy loading.
  2. Use an Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare to speed up loading times.
  3. Post excerpts from posts to speed up loading time.

Have you got any concerns about how to improve your WordPress website's speed? Let us know in the section of comments below!

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