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And if your website takes more time to load, there is a possibility that your visitors may lose interest and move on to other competitor websites. It not only affects your ranking and brand image but also diminishes the chances of attracting more visitors and making good conversions.
Thus, its highly recommended that your WordPress site performs and loads faster than your present or upcoming competitors.
Reasons that slow down your WordPress website:
Lets first understand the reasons behind your slow loading website so that you can make smarter long-term decisions:
Un-optimized or heavy image sizes badly affects your website loading speed as a lot of server resources are used up by them.
Disabled features in your hosting package such as compression and HTTP Keep-Alive or the server when not properly configured, can hurt your website speed.
More use of CSS and JS files leads to increase in the number of requests.
Excessive usage of external scripts such as font loaders or ads badly affects the website performance.
Use of poorly coded plugins.
Load on your server increases if your website is not able to serve cached pages.
Now that you know what slows down your website, lets find out how to boost it up.
Boosting up WordPress website speed by the following 5 easy steps:
1. Select the best WordPress hosting company offering excellent speed, support, and nearest data center: It is the number one factor to consider. As you know, choosing a right host is a daunting task, so before finalizing, no matter how much economic services they provide, think twice. It is advisable to choose the host who offers a wide range of services along with its managed WordPress hosting such as SSH access, free website transfer, domain name registration, Google apps integration, unlimited disk space, data backup, and a number of websites on a single account option. As the location of the server has an impact on your website speed, its essential that you check whether they have their data centers around the world, especially in/near your target market.
2. Remove unnecessary plugins and add-ons: For a blogging CMS like WordPress, its essential to remove the unnecessary plugins, inactive themes, comments and add-ons from the dashboard as they reduce the speed a lot. Although, they enhance your websites functionalities but its essential that you choose only those which are absolutely necessary.
Install P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin which scans all your website plugins and provides a report on how much they are affecting your websites performance.
3. Enable caching for your website: It increases the speed of your website and provides a much faster experience for your visitors. This is possible because it stores a copy of your website on your users browser and serves them that version, until and unless you instruct it to refresh. A research shows that enabling caching reduces the loading time of your website from 2.4 seconds to 0.9 seconds. You can install the W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache to enable your WordPress websites caching.
4. Optimize Your Database: This is the next thing on your to-do list to boost your WordPress website up. If you are using MySQL database, then it can be optimized directly from PHPMyAdmin or you can use WordPress optimization plugins like WP-Optimize and WP-DBManager. These plugins enable you to delete all the pending spam contents, auto-saved drafts, trashed posts, and so on. Also, with the WP-DB Manager, you can regularly set the dates for optimization, so that your site always performs exceptionally well.
5. Compress Images and minify the use of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Images are the largest files and they should be compressed as they take ages to load. Tools such as WP Smush.it and Tiny PNG help you compress your files by automatically stripping metadata and removing unused colors from JPEGs and from indexed images.
More use of HTML, CSS, and JS files also slow your website down as the users treat them individually. Try cssnano to minify CSS and Closure Compiler to minify JS.
There is a tool called Pingdom, which is a free online tool that enables you to check your websites speed from different geographical locations. Once you know the speed of your website and if its not under 2 seconds, you can decrease it by applying the above 5 easy steps.
No doubt, the benefits of having a faster loading WordPress website will surely be worth your time!
If you have any query regarding this, you can ask through the comment section below.
