Providing a delightful customer experience is still the number one priority for many WordPress website owners. Today, we are going to address one of the most impactful factors – website speed, or if you prefer, loading speed.
Once your website traffic starts attracting visitors from all around the globe and your content starts to pile up, it would be smart to revisit your setup and optimize the loading speed for a better customer experience. You don’t know where to start? Here are 5 ways to speed up your WordPress website.
#1. Consider Changing Your Web Host
The loading speed of your website may as well be a sign that you’ve outgrown your web hosting provider. This especially applies to those of you who are running a website on a shared hosting plan. Maybe the time has come for you to go with some of the best web hosting providers available. We can help you a little bit by disclosing the two best types of hosting.
If you don’t have the proper technical knowledge and enough time to set up your server, managed WordPress hosting is definitely the option you should consider.
On the other hand, if you want to take full control of your server management, and are more technically-inclined, VPS hosting is your go-to option and this is the best way to increase WordPress website speed without plugin.
#2. Go For A Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network (CDN) is not a new piece of tech. It has been in use for quite a while now. Many websites powered by WordPress (with huge traffic) are relying on it. CDN takes all your images, CSS, HTML and JavaScript files, redistributes, and stores them on servers all across the globe. When a user wants to visit your website, the CDN will find the closest server and use it to show them the page.
By leveraging the best CDN services for WordPress, you will ensure that every user gets content in the fastest way possible. Ultimately, if you don’t have the time to do anything else, the CDN alone should significantly speed up your WordPress website.
#3. Speed Up WordPress Site Plugins
Beside over 20 million live installations, WordPress has an amazing and huge community behind it. Thanks to this, a great number of pro developers are continuously working on delivering great plugins to WordPress users. Some of these plugins are developed to speed up your WordPress website.
Here are the best ones:
Perfmatters – this premium plugin is designed to tweak your WordPress setup. It will automatically disable everything that is slowing your page. It is very easy to use and with it, you will also be able to reduce HTTP requests, disable the unnecessary code from being loaded every time users visit a different page, and provide you with DNS prefetch support.
WP Super Minify – All that HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code can significantly reduce page loading times. WP Super Minify is a free plugin that can help you with this. It minifies the code, compresses it, and serves it to visitors to achieve faster loading times.
WP Smush.it – If you have a lot of images on your website, you will love this free plugin. WP Smush.it will remove unnecessary bytes from your images without affecting their quality. Optimized images have significantly lower file sizes. Therefore, your entire website will load significantly faster.
#4. Optimize Your WordPress Database
You definitely don’t want to manually optimize your WordPress database, especially not if your website has been around for a while. Instead, install either WP Optimize or WP DB Manager to optimize your database automatically. These addons will help you get rid of tables, spam, post revisions, and drafts – all of which may cause your database to be too large.
#5. Consider Changing Your Theme
We have saved this one for last as it will require most of your time. Your WordPress theme might be the reason for your slow loading times, especially if you are using one with dozens of features which you have never really put to use. If this is the case, you need to tune things down. Here is a link to an extensive WordPress theme loading speed research which may help you pick a new theme for your website.
That’s it, folks. Now that you have 5 options, we recommend you roll up your sleeves and get to work. Don’t forget to monitor and record your website loading speed, so that you can compare the speeds before and after the optimization process. This is the best way to save some time and see if the things you are doing are giving any results.
