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What You Can Do to Increase Your WordPress Website Speed (5 Steps to Improve Your Site Speed)

Sep 6, 2023

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Slow site loading times can sabotage your business. The constant barrage of information have diminished the attention span of humans, meaning users lose interest quicker than ever before.

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If your website is taking too long to load, your visitors may move on to another site.

It is good to know that there are great strategies you can use to improve the speed of your WordPress website's speed. Utilizing plugins, and following the guidelines can help make your website load faster and also keep your visitors to your site.

In this guide, we'll look at five methods to increase the speed of your WordPress speed. We'll also explore what slows down your site, and why fast loading times are so critical. Let's begin!

What slows down your WordPress website's speed? (And Why Speed is Important)

The time it takes to load your website is how long it takes to display all content fully. The content could include pictures or videos as well as text-based components.

The elements most likely to slow your website are:

  • Images
  • Videos
  • The slow plugins
  • Caching is not working.
  • External scripts

This penalizes slow sites and pushes them further down the search results list which makes it more difficult for customers to find your site.

There is a cost-free instrument like IsItWP speed test. IsItWP Speed Test to check the speed of your WordPress website's performance:

When you have a base line, it is time to start making tweaks to improve the loading speed. You can also make use of this tool to conduct tests as part of the updating process to determine which strategies work best for your website.

How to Improve Your WordPress Website's Speed (5 Easy Ways)

Once you've realized the importance of the WordPress site's speed is, let's take a look at some simple ways you can decrease the time it takes for your website to load.

1. Select the right theme and add-ons.

Themes and plugins are the primary parts of WordPress websites. They are the primary components. However, poorly-designed themes and plugins could cause a significant slowdown to your website.

When selecting a new plugin or theme for your website, you'll want to:

  • Look up user ratings as well as reviews. This can give you a good idea for how the plugin and theme will perform for users.
  • Find out whether your theme or plugin have been recently updated. Tools that receive frequent updates from their creators are more reliable and more likely to be optimized.
  • You can test the website's performance prior to as well as after incorporating the new tool, to see whether there is any noticeable reductions.

2. Improve Your Images

In order to reduce the impact of the effect of your media files You can think about using an image optimizer similar to the ShortPixel plug-in:

The plugin is integrated into your WordPress website. It allows you to improve pictures of all file types such as PNG and JPEG. It's extremely user-friendly and it can be used to compress any images on your website with a single click.

You can make use of this ShortPixel plugin to make images more efficient by going to Media > Bulk ShortPixel > Start Optimizing:

This bulk optimization tool can reduce all images within your WordPress library at once.

You may also want to use "lazy loading". This setting prevents your site from showing images until the user scrolls down and reaches the desired images. This can speed the loading process.

You can allow lazy loading using the help of a plugin such as Smush:

After you've installed the plugin all you have to do is to go to Smush > Lazy Load > activate:

Once you activate lazy loading, it is possible to modify various settings such as media types, exclusions, and even script positions. Smush is also a good alternative to compress and reduce the size of images, even without using ShortPixel.

3. Make use of a Caching Plugin (or a Host with Built-In Caching)

Caching is a crucial process that helps your website load quickly. It creates and stores copies of your site in a storage area known as a cache. This means that the site doesn't need to be reloaded with each new user. It can access these stored site information for new visitors, which means it will take much less time to load.

One of the most efficient ways to cache your site is by using an application like WordPress Super Cache. It uses a few different techniques, such as simple static files for general users as well as "super-cached" static documents designed for experienced users.

You can use WordPress Super Cache to save your site's data by going to Settings > WP Super Cache > Caching on:

In this dashboard, you are able to modify your cache settings by navigating through the Advancedtab. In this tab, you have the option of choosing what users will receive cached content, how long your caches last, as well as whether or not you would like to allow expert delivery of caches.

This host's built-in caching is the best on the market, making it literally the fastest WordPress web host available.

4. Make use of the Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a group of servers spread across the world. Each one stores a cache of your site's data as well as when a visitor visits your page they'll receive content from the CDN which is the closest one to them. Your website is therefore able to load a lot more quickly due to the fact that there's less geographic distance.

There are a variety of CDN choices available, such as Cloudflare. Sign up to a paid account and start making use of this top CDN to deliver your site to visitors faster.

5. Make use of Excerpts

If you have a blog, then you probably want to showcase your blog posts. However, displaying the blog posts in their entirety can slow down your website's speed. Instead, you can think about displaying snippets of your content on your landing pages.

You can observe on the blog's homepage that it does not show articles in all their detail. It shows just a few paragraphs from each, and enables the user to select the headline for the full text:

In accordance with your theme it is possible to alter the settings of your browser to show excerpts in the menu the Settings menu > Reading For every blog post Include > Summary:

You can then easily customize the excerpts of the new posts by clicking the Posts tab and clicking Add New. Within this page there is a button to select Exerpt > Post:

There, you can compose a custom-written excerpt which is displayed in lieu of your complete blog. It is also possible to include excerpts in your existing posts.

Conclusion

A slow-loading website could cause a lot of damage to your company. If your customers click away and leave, you may miss the opportunity to convert them. So, optimizing your WordPress website's speed is among of the most important actions you can take.

To recap, these are some ways that you can boost your WordPress performance:

  1. Cut down on the size of your images through the ShortPixel plug-in Consider lazy loading.
  2. Use the Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare to reduce loading time.
  3. Use post excerpts to increase loading speed.

Have you got any concerns regarding how you can improve your WordPress speed? Please let us know via the section of comments below!

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