Speed is arguably the most impactful attribute of any WordPress site. Therefore, WordPress site owners, whether experienced or novice, should be aware of its importance. Moreover, they should consider working on multiple factors that help them increase their sites’ speed considerably.
Continue reading this blog post to learn how to optimize website performance by following different tactics to enhance speed and loading times.
What Can We Do to Improve Our Sites’ Speed?
Luckily, you have numerous options to optimize your website performance by improving speed to the next level. Here are various steps you can take to achieve your mission:
- Reduce website images.
- Audit your website.
- Delete unneeded plugins.
- Choose an advanced and fast theme.
- Update themes and plugins regularly.
- Examine your existing hosting service provider.
- Apply best security practices.
- Reduce total redirects.
- Optimize your database.
- Prioritize your DNS speed.
- Limit HTTP requests.
- Give importance to mobile.
- Combine CSS and JS files.
Reduce website images
Reducing website images helps website owners appropriately resolve slow-speed issues. In this situation, they can benefit from a reliable online tool, TinyPNG.
This tool can help them reduce their larger website images, enhancing their sites’ speed. Interestingly, the best WordPress developers realize its importance as they often use this tool to optimize sites’ images.
Audit your website
Website auditing is one of the leading techniques for identifying areas that need improvement in website performance and speed enhancement. Before you make any changes to your site to improve its performance, it is always recommended that you audit it.
For this purpose, you can depend on a free tool, PageSpeed Insights. It will help you evaluate your Core Web Vitals (CWVs) on desktop and mobile, identify areas for improvement, and inform you if you have passed.
Delete unneeded plugins
Remove unneeded plugins from your site as soon as possible. Once you delete the unwanted plugins, your website’s speed will likely improve and load faster. Therefore, install and activate only those WordPress plugins your website needs.
Choose an advanced and fast theme
Always select an innovative and fast theme that fits your business’s demands. This means your chosen theme must be lightweight and not contain many features.
Otherwise, a theme with numerous features can make your website heavy and take ample time to load. This is not a great thing from a user experience perspective.
When selecting a fast and advanced theme for your site, check online reviews, ratings, compatibility, last update, and number of active installs. Considering all these factors will allow you to choose a near-perfect theme.
Update themes and plugins regularly
One should consider updating themes and plugins when optimizing website performance. If WordPress site owners begin upgrading themes and plugins to the latest versions, they can overcome frustrating issues like high bounce rates to a great extent.
In addition, regular updates help make themes and plugins compatible with the newest WordPress versions. Doing so allows WordPress site owners to enhance their sites’ productivity considerably.
Examine your existing hosting service provider
Sometimes, the hosting service providers can be one of the major problems behind the website performance issues. Therefore, choose your potential hosting service company after considering numerous factors.
In this scenario, you must give importance to different factors like the overall bandwidth of the network connection, types of website hosting services your websites utilize, and physical infrastructure. These factors may influence websites’ speed positively or negatively.
So, do not undermine the significance of hosting service providers when enhancing website performance and speed.
Apply best security practices
Securing your WordPress site may allow you to protect it from different possible security risks and issues. This also helps you optimize your website performance to the next level. Doing so lets you considerably improve your website security and performance.
To do this, consider integrating different security plugins like Sucuri and Wordfence on your WordPress site. These plugins have helpful security features like 2FA (two-factor authentication), a firewall, a security scanner, etc. This way, you can smartly secure your website and enhance its performance.
Reduce total redirects
Redirects play a crucial role in enhancing websites’ traffic. In reality, they motivate users to visit other pages you have recently created. However, the bad thing is that too many redirects increase the server’s load, significantly increasing loading time.
Users may get too comfortable switching up website content and URLs and expecting redirects to address the problem. Not only does this slow down loading time, but it can also create a mess for your site architecture that’s difficult to unpick.
This is why you should only use a redirect to stabilize content views. That said, you must take advantage of new content to replace old redirects with it. This way, you can reduce page load time to a certain degree.
Optimize your database
You should optimize your database regularly since it becomes disorganized as time progresses. This is because unneeded and redundant data hamper the database’s effectiveness. In this situation, you have no option other than deleting unused plugins and spam comments. When performing this activity, you can use an impressive WordPress plugin, WP-Optimize.
This plugin can clean your database, compress images, and cache your website. Besides, its minification feature lets you enhance page speed and load time. Therefore, you must use this all-in-one plugin to boost your website performance overall.
Prioritize your DNS speed
Do you know your domain name server (DNS) can hamper your site loading time? Yes, it is correct. If your domain name server takes time to respond, your time to first byte (TTFB) will be longer, negatively affecting your website’s loading time.
Therefore, you must assess the performance of different DNS providers before selecting the right one for your site. Various hosting service providers offer DNS services to their customers.
Limit HTTP requests
Do you know every HTTP request bet it for fonts, scripts, stylesheets, and images does increase the site’s overall speed time significantly? It is harsh but true, unfortunately. Therefore, you must limit HTTP requests to manage and improve your website’s speed. Otherwise, these HTTP requests are compiled and create a delay between page loading and user click-throughs. Therefore, you should minify CSS and JavaScript files to decrease the HTTP requests made by your website.
After minifying CSS and JS files, you can smartly improve your website’s performance, as it allows you to reduce the size of these files by deleting unneeded characters like line breaks, whitespaces, and comments.
Give importance to mobile
Millions of users visit their preferred websites on mobiles daily. The data from the HubSpot survey, comprised of over 400 web traffic analysts in the US, reveals that 41% of traffic to their sites belongs to mobile users. On the other hand, desktop users constitute 38% of traffic.
The above statistics suggest that site owners must prioritize mobile users when improving their website speed and performance. This is because the population of mobile users will increase over time worldwide. Thus, site owners and developers must ensure that their current and potential sites are mobile-optimized and offer an engaging user experience to visitors.
Undoubtedly, fast and results-driven mobile websites are the go-to option in this age of modernization. We cannot deny that mobile devices have recently become a leading browsing and shopping medium for users worldwide.
Combine CSS and JS files
As the largest files on the website, CSS and JS files take up a lot of space and resources. Therefore, you must combine these files to speed up your website for all the right reasons. To do this, you should have prior website development experience.
Otherwise, you can coordinate with your site developers, who can combine CSS and JS files to reduce the steps needed to load your website.
Wrapping Things Up
Summing up, faster sites help site owners reduce bounce rates and increase conversions accordingly. All the above steps allow them to enhance their sites’ performance significantly.
Improve your website speed and keep current and potential visitors interested and engaged with your products or services. Website owners must also consider deploying some of the best security practices to safeguard their WordPress sites from possible security threats. These threats include hacking, phishing, malware, and DDoS attacks.
Back to the point, improving website speed and loading times is an ongoing activity. In addition, WordPress owners and stakeholders need to follow the above steps regularly.
As a result, they can keep their WordPress sites up and running at all times without difficulty. If they cannot do it themselves, they can consider getting the services of professionals. They can help them monitor and sustain their websites’ performance tailored to their specific needs and customer bases’ preferences.
