12 Easy Steps to Increase Speed of Your WordPress Website 

12 Easy Steps to Increase Speed of Your WordPress Website

How important is the speed of your website to the overall success of your online presence? Extremely important. Consider that the bounce rate of your website is the rate at which someone visits your website and leaves after viewing just one page-increases by 15 percent for every one-second delay in load time. As far as statistics are concerned, if your website takes more than 4 seconds to load, you will lose half of your visitors before they finish loading your website. Take into account that increasing numbers of people are using mobile devices as their preferred choice to browse the internet. We need to factor in issues of latency and bandwidth on mobile networks with concurrent mobile traffic. By increasing your site speed by just one second, you create a better user experience (UX), greater involvement and more satisfaction for your customers.

Speed of the website is one of the most important factors for your website. Browsing multiple pages, shopping, downloading documents – these all add up to more and more load time. Better website speed leads better experiences and faster conversions resulting in better leads and happier customers who talk about you to their friends.

Google highly cares about the speed of your website.

Google is firmly invested in the better-faster philosophy. Their search algorithms clock load times when they index a website which results in their overall site ranking. Your site ranking is a significant factor for people who search on Google.

Google places a huge importance on mobile performance in addition to the traditional desktop websites. In 2018 Google launched its Mobile First Metric, ranking mobile pages based on best mobile first design practices.

How do you determine your website's speed?

There are multiple free online tools that evaluate your website, including the website speed, to determine several critical performance criteria. The three tools we use for each audit of customers are: Pingdom, Gtmetrix & PageSpeed Insights.

Your website speed is also an important web metric. A W3C-compliant website ensures that your site uses industry standards and best practices.

How to increase WordPress website speed.

With the majority of today 's websites running on WordPress, it is quite likely that you will have a WordPress website for your company. Boosting your WordPress website performance requires a few practical and technical improvements that do not emerge from the box. Here are 12 measures you can take today to speed up your website:

1. Enable Caching

   Caching is very much an important way to improve the speed of your website. A web cache is a technology which stores temporary files to reduce server latency on your browser. That's why when you go to the website for the first time, it tends to load more slowly than when you come back later. Caching plugins help to build an incredibly fast load time that is critical when optimizing web sites. It simulates a visit to cache plugin by preloading web files to your web server, which immediately boosts your web site speed and search engine visibility.

   The three tools we use for customers are : WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache & WP Super Cache

2. Enable Image Compression

   When you first access your website on your desktop or mobile device, you download data from a remote server. Consider the server-to-device connection as a pipeline, the larger the pipeline, the more data will flow. The bandwidth requirements have made the web today a pleasant experience compared to the miserable early days of dial-up connections, but the question of bandwidth still affects today's websites. You can benefit from lower load-time without sacrificing quality by adding a WordPress plugin that compresses all images on your web site.

   The three tools we use for customers are : WP Smush, ShortPixel Image Optimizer & Compress JPEG & PNG Images

3. Enable Lazy Loading

   Lazy loading is a development tactic that prioritizes content over the fold or what the user sees when he first accesses a web page. Failure to load is common sense as users usually spend several seconds reading the initial contents before scrolling down the page. The rest of the page continues to load slowly/lazily while the user is on the page thus it is called lazy loading. Lazy loading leads to a better user experience, since the site visitor must not wait until the content is loaded at once. Lazy loading is a great technique for speeding up the website.

   The three tools we use for customers are : a3 Lazy Load, WordPress Infinite Scroll and Lazy Load by WP Rocket.

4. Minimize JavaScript and CSS

   JavaScript and CSS are the elements used to create web pages in conjunction with HTML. Depending on the developer 's skills, the number of features on your page may slow down your site. By minimizing or merging the number of JavaScript and CSS files, you will lighten the code and increase the speed of your website. Also, using asynchronous loading will allow files to be loaded simultaneously instead of one at a time.

   The three tools we use for customers are : WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache & WP Super Cache

5. Remove unnecessary plugins from your CMS

   WordPress plugins are important but not always essential. It's hard to resist downloading them in the hope that the speed and performance of your website will always be enhanced. WordPress literally has thousands of themes and plugins with new ones coming out every day. Plugins are one of the benefits that makes WordPress so great that we can enjoy the contributions made by thousands of independent developers who are working hard to make WordPress the most popular CMS on the market. However, having too many plugins may have inherent problems that could negatively affect the speed and performance of your website.

   All those plugins, put simply, will slow down your website and even cause it to malfunction. Some will even cause the site to stop functioning perfectly, and the downloading of redundant plugins will create conflicts that affect the functionality and performance of the website. In addition, plugins will require frequent updates. Failure to do so may lead to security and performance issues.

   Remove any unnecessary plugins from your website. This may require you to go through your list of plugins one by one, deactivate them, and test the website for the performance and speed which might have negatively affected the plugin. If the plugin deactivation does something to screw up the website, simply reactivate it and the problem will be corrected. Once you determine which plugins you do not use or need, delete them from WordPress. This will have a positive overall effect on the speed of the website plus a reduction in overall maintenance time.

6. Upgrade to latest version of PHP

   PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is just an open-source programming language used by most web developers today and is what WordPress builds on. As with any software, PHP is constantly being optimized to improve performance, stability, and security. By keeping your website up-to-date with PHP updates, you ensure that you run the fastest compatible version. You will need to login to the Cpanel of your host account to determine which version of PHP your website is running on and see if newer versions are available. This is a fairly simple process, but you may want to contact tech support and ask for step-by-step guidance.

7. Minimize HTTP requests

   This is where things get technical, and you're most likely going to need the help of a web developer. The majority of the loading time on the web page is from downloading different parts of the page. This includes all the scripts, stylesheets and images on that page. Each time an element is downloaded from the page, an HTTP request is submitted to the host server. The more requests you need to load a full page, the longer the loading time. By minimising the number of HTTP requests that a page needs to be rendered, you will provide a good boost to the speed of your website.

8. Add Expires Headers

   Web pages are made up of scripts, stylesheets and images. As the web page becomes more complex, these elements will begin to block the pipeline and slow down the loading time of your page. By using the Expires headers, the page elements will be cached, requiring fewer HTTP requests and speeding up the speed of your website.

9. Reduce DNS lookups

   Server response time is among the major factors in page load time. The Domain Name System ( DNS) is a web server that contains tens of thousands of IP addresses and their corresponding domains. Typing a domain from a browser will activate the associated DNS server and call the relevant IP address to load the page. This process is similar to looking for a name in an address book. Slow DNS search will have a negative effect on loading your website page. Switching to a faster DNS server is pretty easy to do and requires logging in to the host account cpanel of your website.

10. Avoid URL redirects

    URL redirects are also used when a new website is launched. When a new website is created, the layout and names of each page are altered several times , making old pages into dead links. Because you have launched your new website, the old website stays indexed for many days, or even weeks, and there might be other domains out there that connect to your old website's internal pages.

    Dead links are terrible for SEO. Google and other search engines will index the website for dead links and punish you with a lower position of searches. There are several WordPress plugins available that can redirect a dead page on your website to a live page. One common alternative is Simple 301 Redirects. While URL redirects after a new website launch are a common short-term solution for dead links, they will slow down your website load time. The explanation for this is that the user initially attempts to load the original tab, and could still have it loaded, only to obtain the redirect instructions. This ends up taking several micro-seconds to process and load the new page which leads to an overall website speed decrease.

    Using redirects sparingly, and delete them completely while indexing the new website. Backlinks from other websites are more difficult to repair and can require that you contact the owner of the website and ask to change the backlink. You can search for backlinks using a free backlink checker by heading to ahrefs.

11. Enable a CDN

    Increasing the speed of your website is the most important reason why you would opt for the Content Delivery Network. A fast website directly leads to higher conversion rates, higher Usability, low bounce rates, and sustained web visits is indeed a no-brainer.

    Since much of the loading time on the website depends on uploading static files like photos and CSS stylesheets, it is not difficult to assume that using CDN would result in a higher speed on a website. It is achieved primarily using the file caching principles.

    Much as you can use caching plugins for your WordPress website, Content Delivery Networks will often use caching to deliver the files to the browsers of users more quickly.

    Caching is CDN 's strength. It is achieved by transferring your static web files to much more powerful proxy servers, explicitly designed for faster delivery of material.

    The closer the caching server is to the user, the shorter the timeline required to open the browser for all of your page's info. Such servers use enhanced storages for RAM and SSD. The RAM is used for content with the highest priority, and the SSD is used for content of lower priority, but it is still cacheable and users can request it.

    CDNs : Cloudflare, Fastly, KeyCDN, Amazon CloudFront & Microsoft Azure CDN

12. Upgrade to VPS hosting

    Many host companies often provide hosting packages. Godaddy, Hostinger, Hostgator Inmotion & Siteground are common WordPress hosting service providers, mostly they offer the following three different hosting levels:

    1. Shared Hosting

       Shared hosting is the cheapest alternative so you get what you're paying for. If you have a shared hosting account, the hosting space is basically shared with many other websites. It is fine for low-traffic websites but as the traffic grows you will need to consider upgrading because the shared server deals with spikes in site traffic, both from the website and from other shared server websites.

    2. VPS hosting

       VPS hosting represents a major step up from shared hosting. You will get improved performance and capacity for the server to handle your traffic spikes with VPS, or Virtual Private Server, which contributes to increased website speed. VPS can use SSD, or Solid State Drives, to improve output over conventional hard drives. You will share the server with other websites using VPS, but your site will have its own dedicated section of it's server.

    3. Dedicated hosting

       Dedicated hosting is the best and the most expensive alternative, too. For a dedicated server, the entire unit for your website is practically rented out. Larger companies, like Amazon or Apple, run their website on several dedicated servers to handle the huge traffic they generate from their websites. Dedicated hosting can be incredibly costly for most website needs, and should therefore be considered excessive.

Conclusion

The topics we discussed in this blog post are just a few important activities you might consider doing to improve the speed and load time of your website. While there are several technical measures that can be used to improve the website here is a review of all the measures that we discussed in this blog post

1. Enable Caching
2. Enable Image Compression
3. Enable Lazy Loading
4. Minimise Javascripts and CSS
5. Remove Unnecessary Plugins
6. Upgrade to the latest version of PHP
7. Minimise HTTP Requests
8. Add Expires Headers
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Avoid URL Redirects
11. Enable CDN
12. Upgrade to VPS Hosting Plan

Take steps to increase the speed of your website

If you need help improving the speed and overall performance of your website, then call us today and We will work closely to help you convert your goals into achievable final results. Everybody in our team looks forward to simply bringing your vision to life, so get in touch today and have an initial discussion schedule.

If you are interested in professional Website designing, development and optimization for your business or non-profit organization give us a call today