How To Speed Up WordPress Performance In A Jiffy: Learn The Ultimate Hacks
People these days have innumerable options while they’re searching online. It means if your site’s performance is poor, you’ll lose your visitors to your competitors. That’s the reason why you should learn to speed up WordPress performance in order to yield the benefits.
A fast loading page doesn’t only provide an improved user experience, but also it increases your page views, helps with your SEO, and a lot more.
Still, you must be wondering, why would you care for your WordPress performance, right? Well, we will discuss the topic in detail below. Whether you’re in a doubt about improving your WordPress performance or you’re keen to know the hacks to conduct the process, you’ll learn them all under this one guide.
So, let’s get started without any further ado,
Why WordPress Performance Matters
Well, the attention span of the users is dropping as time flies. From 2000 to 2020 there has been a significant drop in the user’s attention span.
It’s because people are opening up multiple tabs while searching for anything online. So, if any page is loading slow, they simply close the tab and move on to the next one.
This is the reason why it’s important to improve your WordPress performance as a website owner. After all, you want visitors to stay at your site, right?
A slow website means your users will potentially leave the site. On the other hand, you can significantly improve the conversion rate and reduce the bounce rate by optimizing WordPress performance.
Now, when we are speaking of WordPress speed, you must be wondering how to check your site’s speed if you’re a beginner. Right?
Well, don’t worry! We’ll get into that too.
How To Check Your WordPress Speed
Since you visit your site frequently, the browser stores your information in the cache and prefetch it as soon as you type in the address. So, this makes your site load much faster than it loads on the other browser.
So, people normally don’t realize if they’re dealing with a WordPress performance or not. You might be thinking that the site is loading fast when your users may have a hard time loading the site on their browser.
That’s the reason why it’s important to check the WordPress speed on tools like IsItWp’s WordPress speed test | GTmetrix | Google PageSpeed Insights. These are free tools that allows you to test your site’s speed irrespective of the location or anything else.
Once you test your site’s speed on these tools, you’ll be surprised to see that the major websites load within 2 seconds. So, if you want to make your site better and optimize its performance you should work towards loading it in under 2 seconds too.
But, what slows down your site’s performance? Did you ever think of that?
Well, let’s jump into that…
Things That Slow Down Your WordPress Website Performance
Your speed test will also suggest multiple suggestions to improve your site’s speed. However, the most important things that slow down a site’s performance are underneath,
The importance of good web hosting will always remain undeniable when it comes to WordPress performance. After all, your site can’t load faster when it’s not configured with the hosting server properly. That’s the reason why experts recommend opting for hosting servers like Bluehost or SiteGround to optimize your site’s performance. Make sure you’re opting for a dedicated hosting server as the page loads slowly when you’re sharing the server with multiple people.
It’s important to configure your WordPress site properly otherwise it will overload the server and cause the site to load slowly.
If you’re using larger sized images on your site, it will cause the site to load slower. That’s why the experts always recommend going for compressed pictures rather than using large-sized pictures.
If you’re using a poorly coded plugin for your site, it’ll also impact your site’s speed.
Gaze The Hacks To Speed Up WordPress Site Performance
So, now you have understood the importance of managing your WordPress site performance, the things that make the site slow. Now it’s time to uncover the ultimate hacks to speed up the WordPress performance.
- Install A Caching Plugin
- Optimize The Images
- Keep WordPress Site Updated
- Optimize The Background Process
- Use A Content Delivery Network
- Don’t Upload Files Directly To WordPress
- Use An Optimized Theme
- Use Better Plugins
- Reduce External HTTP Requests
- Use The Latest PHP Version
- Fix The HTTPS Errors
- Disable Hotlinking
- Limit The Number Of Post Revisions
- Split Long Posts
- Add Lazyload To Your Images
We understand that making any changes to your website can be terrifying sometimes because you fear losing the data or facing a new problem. This is especially true with the beginners, right?
So, a lot of you may think that it’s better to keep your site slow rather than optimizing its performance. Isn’t it?
But, you’ll be calling for ultimate disaster if you don’t bother to take a few actionable steps to optimize your site’s performance. This is because you can’t improve your site’s ranking, user experience, conversion rates, or anything if the page loads slow.
So, relax for a while and follow the guide with us. It’s pretty simple and easy. And you can do this!
Install A Caching Plugin
A WordPress caching plugin helps to find the required information on a page when someone logs in. Generally, the WordPress pages are too dynamic in their nature. Every time someone visits a page on the site, it builds on the fly.
WordPress has to conduct a process to get the required information before it displays a page to your user. The process involves innumerable steps and it can seriously slow down your site especially if you have multiple people visiting your site.
This is why it’s important to use a WordPress caching plugin as it catches the information 5x time faster.
There are innumerable WordPress caching plugins available including the WP rocket, WP super cache plugin, etc. You can install the plugin and get started with speeding up your WordPress performance.
Optimize The Images
Well, you have to optimize the images for better management of your site. Without using the compressed images, you can’t expect your site to load faster. Researchers have found that using colored visuals makes your content to be likely by people.
So, you can’t expect to run your site without images. Right?
However, if the images aren’t optimized, it will cause more damages than help. In fact, this is the main reason for your site being slow. So, before you upload an image directly on your site, you should use photo editing software to speed up WordPress performance.
Based on the editing software you use, you can reduce the image size up to 5x times. But remember when you compress the images, it loses its high quality. Still, you can’t use larger sized images as it will cause the site to load faster.
Keep WordPress Site Updated
WordPress is updated very frequently. Each update may not offer new features but it may fix the security issues and bugs. Also, your WordPress plugins and themes will have regular updates too. That’s the reason why it’s important for you to keep your site updated to the latest version so that the performance remains optimized.
Not doing so will make your site appear slow and it will also make your site vulnerable to security threats.
Optimize The Background Process
Other background processes may include backup plugins, excessive crawling by the search engines, etc. This will cause the website to run slow in the future. So, optimize the background process for maintaining your site’s overall performance.
The background process includes the tasks that run in the background of your WordPress site. It includes the WordPress backup plugin task, the Cron jobs to publish scheduled posts, Cron jobs to check for updates, and search engine crawlers to fetch the content.
Use A Content Delivery Network
All your favorite blogs are using a content delivery network. You must be aware of the fact that the users in different geographical locations experience different loading times on your site. It’s because of the location of the web hosting servers. For instance, your web hosting company has a server in the US. so, the visitors in the US will experience faster loading speed as compared to the visitors in India.
But, using a CDN, you can instantly boost the site’s loading speed for all your visitors. It’s a network made up of servers across the world. So, each server will store the static files to make up the site. This includes CSS, javascript, images, etc. Visitors from across the globe will experience the same loading times when you’ll use the CDN network.
Don’t Upload Files Directly To WordPress
WordPress allows you to directly upload the video and audio files to your site. It will display them in the HTML5 player.
But, guess what, you should never do that!
This is because when you host your audio or video files using the HTML5 player, it will cost you the bandwidth. So, not only the web hosting company can charge excessive fees for using excessive bandwidth, but also they may shut the site altogether even if you are using unlimited bandwidth.
Also, it increases the backup sizes and makes it difficult to restore the files for backup. Therefore, you should better use video and audio hosting services like YouTube, Dailymotion, SoundCloud for uploading the audio and video files.
Use An Optimized Theme
The theme that you use in your WordPress site plays an important role in terms of making your site slow. So you should always select a theme that is optimized for speed. There are impressive-looking themes that are available in the WordPress directories.
It’s always better to opt for a simpler theme rather than choosing one with a bloated and complex layout, and other unnecessary features. You can simply add these features through the WordPress plugins in case you need them.
Use Better Plugins
A poorly coded plugin will only slow down the process of your WordPress site. So, it’s important to choose the best plugins for your site rather than choosing them randomly. We pay attention to the user experience, ease of use, and performance of the plugins while suggesting any WP plugins to our clients.
If you’re wondering which plugins you must use in order to optimize the speed, we have a better suggestion for you.
Let’s take a look…
WPForms is considered one of the fastest and beginner-friendly plugins for building contact forms on your WordPress site.
The Envira Gallery plugin is an ideal plugin that provides the fastest services. Other plugins available for the photo galleries, can slow down your site’s speed. So, it’s better to shift to Envira for the best results.
If you’re looking for social media plugins that load additional scripts, shared counts are the ideal one for you.
If you want to add sliders to the site, then soliloquy is the ideal one for you. These plugins won’t make your site slow rather it will optimize your site for better performance.
Reduce External HTTP Requests
Many WordPress themes and plugins load all kinds of files from other sites. These files include stylesheets, scripts, images from external sources like Facebook, Google, analytics services, etc. If you’re using a few of these, then it may not impact your site’s speed but if you’re using many of these files, it may make your site load slower than normal.
Sometimes the plugins make a lot of HTTP requests which causes the site to slow down. So, you should reduce these HTTP requests in order to optimize your WordPress performance. This can be done by disabling the scripts, merging all the files into one.
Use The Latest PHP Version
It’s important to use the latest PHP programming language in order to optimize your site’s speed. PHP is basically the server’s side language which means that it runs on the hosting server. All the major WordPress hosting companies prefer to use a stable PHP version for their servers.
This is the reason why the experts often suggest you opt for the best hosting servers to make your site optimized. Sometimes the hosting companies, especially the cheaper ones use the older version of the PHP. This causes the site to load 2x times slower.
Fix The HTTPS Errors
Often people use a plugin to fix the HTTP errors. But if you’re using plugins to fix these errors, it may slow down your site. Generally, there is a really simple SSL plugin, available on the WP directory to fix these HTTP errors. But, you should never do that.
Because this will reduce the site’s speed before you know it. So, fix the common SSL issues without using the plugin.
Disable Hotlinking
The problem that people face while creating content on WordPress is that often their content gets stolen in the future. For instance, other websites may serve your images from their URLs on your site rather than uploading them to their servers. This costs you your bandwidth for which you don’t have the traffic to show.
So, you should always disable hotlinking in order to prevent others from stealing your content. One way to do this is by adding the code .htaccess file to block the image hotlinking from your site.
Limit The Number Of Post Revisions
Generally, the post revisions take a lot of space in your database. Some users believe that it will improve the quality of the site but the truth is that the site will load slowly if the number of post revisions increases. So, you should limit the number of revisions to keep the site optimized.
Split Long Posts
Longer posts tend to perform well in the search engines. Because the users always prefer an in-depth guide when they’re searching for something online. But, when you’re uploading these long-form posts with images and videos, it can hurt the site’s loading times.
This is the reason why you should split up the longer articles into multiple pages. There’s an inbuilt functionality to split pages in WordPress without using any coding. So, split the content into pages to improve your site’s speed.
Add LazyLoad To Your Images
Lazyload is the process of loading a single image at once. It means it loads the images as the reader scrolls down the pages. It doesn’t force your site to load multiple images at once and doesn’t cause the site to run slow.
Otherwise, when your site has multiple high-quality images and it loads all the content at once, it’ll reduce the page loading speed.
Conclusion
Building a website on WordPress has become quite simple these days ever since people have started using WordPress. These are some of the important hacks to improve your WordPress site performance. After all, without satisfying the users and having them engaged, you can’t expect your site to perform well in the future.
Therefore, it’s important for everyone to follow the above-mentioned steps to optimize their WordPress site’s performance.
That’s it!
We hope that you have managed to optimize your site’s performance and enjoy a faster loading speed than before. We would love to hear your experiences from you, so don’t forget to share with us.