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How to Improve Your WordPress Page Speed (5 Simple Ways)

Sep 6, 2023

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A slow website loading time can sabotage your business. Social media and a constant barrage of information have diminished the attention span of humans which means that users are bored more quickly than ever before.

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If your site takes too long to load, your prospective customers could simply go to your competitor's site and click away.

Fortunately, there are some effective strategies to improve your WordPress website's performance. Using plugins and following best practices can make your website load faster and keep your visitors on your page.

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

What is the cause of slowing down your WordPress website's speed? (And the reason why speed is important)

Time to load a website refers to the amount of time it takes your site to show all of the content in its entirety. This content can include images video, text, or other elements.

The factors that are most likely to slow your website are:

  • Images
  • Videos
  • Slow plugins
  • Lack of caching
  • External scripts

The algorithm penalizes websites that are slow and puts them on the bottom of the results page, making it harder for your customers to find your company.

It is possible to use a no-cost instrument like the IsItWP speed test to assess your WordPress website's performance.

After you've established your baseline, you can start making changes to speed up loading times. Additionally, you can utilize this tool to perform tests during the update process to determine which strategies will be most efficient for your site.

How to Improve Your WordPress website's speed (5 Simple Ways)

If you're aware of the importance of the WordPress website's speed is important, we'll look at the ways to speed up the loading of your website.

1. Pick your theme and plugins carefully

Themes and plugins are key elements of WordPress websites. Themes and plugins are essential components of WordPress. But, poorly-designed themes or plugins can make your site slow.

If you are choosing a theme or plugin for your website, you'll want to consider:

  • Review user reviews and comments. This can give an idea of how the plugin or theme will perform for users.
  • Find out whether the theme or plugin has recently been updated. Tools that receive regular updates from the developers are more reliable and more likely to be optimized.
  • It is possible to test the performance of the staging site before and after adding the new instrument, and see if there are any significant reductions.

2. Optimize Your Images

For reducing the impact of your media files it is recommended to use an image optimizer similar to the ShortPixel software:

This plugin integrates into your WordPress website. It lets you optimize images of most file types, including PNG as well as JPEG. It is very user-friendly, and allows you to compress all images on your website by a single button.

It is possible to utilize ShortPixel as a ShortPixel plugin to improve images using the Media tab, then Bulk ShortPixel > Begin Optimizing:

The tool for bulk optimization can compress all the images in your WordPress library at once.

There is another option to make use of "lazy loading". This will stop your site from showing pictures until a user scrolls down and reaches the images. This speeds up the initial loading time.

You can allow lazy loading using an application like Smush:

After installing the plugin, all you have to do is navigate to Smush > Lazy Load > activate:

When you enable lazy loading, you can modify various settings such as media types, exclusions, and the script's placement. Smush is also a good option to compress and resize images even if you do not use ShortPixel.

3. Make use of a Caching Plugin (or Host with built-in Caching)

Caching is a crucial process to help your website run faster. It makes and saves duplicates of your website in a location called a cache. This means that the site doesn't need to be reloaded with each new visitor. The server is able to retrieve the saved site details for new visitors, which means it takes much less time to load.

One of the simplest methods of caching your site is using an application like WP Super Cache. It makes use of a range of ways, like simple static files designed for common users and "super-cached" static files for experts:

It is possible to use WP Super Cache to store your site's information by going to settings > Super Cache > Caching on:

Within this dashboard, users are able to modify your cache settings by navigating through the Advancedtab. You can select what users will receive cached content, how long the caches are able to last, and whether you want to make sure that your caches are delivered by an expert.

Its internal caching feature is one of the most efficient on the market, making it by far the fastest WordPress web host available.

4. Use the Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers located around all over the globe. Each of them stores a cache of the data on your website, and when a user comes to your website, they will receive the data from the CDN which is the closest one to them. Thus, your site will load a lot more quickly due to the fact that there's less geographic distance.

There are a variety of CDN alternatives available, including Cloudflare. It is possible to sign up for an account that is paid and begin making use of this top CDN for your website to bring it to your visitors quicker.

5. Use Excerpts

If your website has blogs, you'll probably want to showcase your content. The problem is that displaying blog posts in their entirety can slow down your website's speed. Instead, think about displaying snippets of the content on the landing pages.

For example, you can notice on the blog's homepage that it does not show the entire blog posts. It only shows a few sentences from each one, and allows the visitor to simply click the title to read the rest:

In accordance with your theme it is possible to alter your settings so that excerpts are displayed in the menu settings > reading > For every post in a field, include > Summary:

Then, you can easily customize the excerpts of new posts by going to posts > add new. In this window, you can click on Post > Excerpt:

You can also compose a custom-written excerpt which is displayed in lieu of your complete article. Additionally, you can add excerpts to your existing posts.

Conclusion

Slow loading websites can be disastrous for your business. If visitors leave your site they could be missing the opportunity to convert them. So, optimizing your WordPress site's speed is one of the most important actions you can take.

In summary, these are some ways that you can boost your WordPress performance:

  1. Cut down on the size of your images through the ShortPixel software Also, think about lazy loading.
  2. Make use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare to speed up loading times.
  3. Utilize post excerpts to speed up loading time.

Have you got any concerns concerning how you can speed up your WordPress site's performance? Let us know in the comment section below!

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