7 ways to speed up WordPress performance (UPDATED)
The most effective method to accelerate WordPress is certainly a hotly debated issue nowadays.Fortunately, there are numerous techniques that you can employ to do the job. So, our intent here is to list every trick we know that can make your WordPress site much faster.
Why should you fast up WordPress?
There are many reasons for alarm bells ringing, some of which may even cause serious concern to you:
Search engines (like Google) rank websites with faster loading times than slow loading ones. So if you want to improve your position in SERPs, improving speed should be one of your priorities.
Studies have shown that a site load speed of more than 2 seconds usually causes about 47 percent of visitors to bounce off the website. So, to keep about half of your visitors interested, you should speed up WordPress.
So, if you run an e-commerce store on WordPress, you should prepare yourself to make important improvements so that your company can be more profitable.
How to test the stacking time of your site?
First, you need to analyze the current loading time for your website. Keep in mind that this speed can differ from one page to another, as it depends on various factors, namely:
- The size of that particular page,
- How many requests it generates,
- Regardless of whether it is cached,
- Finally what kind of content (static or dynamic) it hosts.
The homepage of a website is generally used as a reference point to test the loading time. To check the speed of a website, the following three tools are widely used across the web:
- WebPageTest. org
- Tools.Pingdom. com
- PageSpeed Insights (this doesn’t really report the page load time, but highlights the elements you can modify to speed up WordPress)
Here are the 7 ways to speed up wordpress backend:
Choose a better web hosting provider
The main factor affecting the speed of a website is the hosting of your WordPress website. It might be a good idea to host your new website on a shared hosting provider that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, space, email, domains and more. In any case, the point we typically miss about this offer is that mutual facilitating situations neglect to give great burden times at top traffic times and most neglect to convey99% uptime in a given month.
Shared hosting tends to perform worse because you are sharing the same server space with countless other websites and you don’t know how many resources other people are using. Also, you don’t know exactly how well optimized the servers are.
Luckily, the web facilitating industry has progressed with innovation and the costs of cloud facilitating suppliers have declined after some time.Currently, dedicated cloud servers can be purchased from SiteGround, DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services and even Google Compute Engine for a nominal price.
However, setting up these servers can be a daunting task as you need to configure the servers from scratch. There are web hosting providers such as Cloudways that make it the job of configuring optimized cloud servers such as click and start.
Reduce the size of the image
Images contribute more to increasing the size of a particular web page. Try reducing the size of images without setting standards.
If you manually optimize your images using Chrome’s or Photoshop’s or other tools, the process will take a long time. Luckily, there are modules accessible for nearly anything you can consider, including picture improvement.The ones worth mentioning are:
- Optimole
- WP Smush
- EWWW Image Optimizer
Utilizing any of the modules referenced above on your WordPress webpage will definitely decrease the size of the pictures, along these lines improving the speed of your site.
Minimize JS and CSS files
If you manage your website through the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, you will probably be informed about minimizing the size of your CSS and JS files. This means that by reducing the number of CSS and JS calls and the size of those files, it is possible to improve the loading speed of the site.
Also, if you know the WordPress themes, you can study the guides provided by Google and make some manual corrections. If not, there are modules that will assist you with accomplishing this; the most well-known is Autoptimize which can assist you with streamlining CSS, JS and even HTML from your WordPress site.
Use advanced caching mechanisms with a caching plug-in
WordPress caching plugins (eg W3 Total Cache) have been around for a long time, simplifying the complex tasks of adding caching rules to website elements. The combination of this plug-ins with advanced mechanisms caching like Varnish could help you improve your website’s loading speed and ultimately speed up WordPress considerably.
Use a light WordPress theme
WordPress themes with many dynamic elements, cursors, widgets, social icons and many other shiny elements are immensely attractive to the eyes. But remember this: if they have too many elements and higher page sizes, they will surely cause a severe blow to your web server.
The most ideal choice here is to utilize light topics.One solution is to choose one of the predefined WordPress themes. Another is to try something like Neve, built by the same guys behind CodeinWP.
Minimize external scripts
Using external scripts on your web pages adds a great deal of data to your total load time. Therefore, it is best to use a low number of scripts, including only essential elements such as tracking tools (like Google Analytics) or comment systems.
Result
The biggest advantage of reducing your website’s load times is that it will greatly help improve your visitors’ experience. The case remains the same regardless of whether they use mobile devices or PCs.
In addition, it will also improve your rankings in the SERPs. After all, reduced use of hosting bandwidth and faster client-side site loading will be beneficial in both the short and long term.
If you haven’t created a blog yet, check out this guide: how to create a site on WordPress. It is an excellent resource that offers step-by-step tutorials on creating a personal or professional blog.