How long do you wait on a slow loading website? Or how many times do you come back to a website that lacks speed? What do you feel when site browsing is not smooth and fast?
We live in a situation of comfort and convenience. All we want is to happen things in favour of us quickly. This is why Website speed is most crucial to win customers and their staying session on your website. A fast loading website improves customer experience, ranks higher in Google search and stays way ahead of competitors.
On the other hand, a slow website is enough to kill your business. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. How bothered do you feel to navigate a slow site? Will you ever come back here or find another fast website that fulfils your purpose?
According to Neil Patel, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Read the full article here.
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How fast WordPress is?
Ok, come to WordPress now. Many of us like WordPress heavily to build a new blog or launch an online business. And our preference is right! It powers 39.5% of all websites in 2021!
WordPress gained its popularity for its easiness to use and flexibility to build any kind of websites. It has many themes and plugins that make life easy both for developers and business owners. Moreover, there is no coding skill needed to build a site on WordPress. Anyone with zero coding experience, can build a stunning responsive website with WordPress.
But all its power fetch some downsides too. Many new site owners and freelancers face slow loading WordPress sites and become frustrated. They tend to hire experts and spend money on them to optimize their sites.Â
This article is to help the newbies, freelancers and business owners who want to speed up their website without spending much money. You are also assured that you don’t need any coding knowledge to follow all these techniques. Just learn some basic rules and apply them in your site, you are done. You have the power to speed up your site and take your business to the next level.
How to measure results for speed test?
To test speed for any website or certain webpage, look at your current records in any of these tools.
GTmetrix, Webpagetest.org, Pingdom tools, or Pagespeed.web.dev are industry standard testing tools.
The more tools you use, more better will be the output. Making changes according to the recommendations are always the first choices. You can hire an expert for solving complex issues always. But before that you can implement some changes that are so easy but powerful enough. After that, measure your results again. Hopefully, you will see magical improvements.Â
Oh, one thing to remember! Don’t forget to backup your site before any changes done.
Show me the techniques to boost speed
1. Select a fastest secured web hosting
A fast hosting can do the heavy lifting for you in terms of speed and other factors. A fast hosting can have built in CDN and lowest downtime.Â
If you have budget, i suggest you to buy a managed wordpress hosting plan that will save lots of hours for you worrying about speed. Read our managed hosting guide here.
If you have low budget, then Hostinger is the perfect choice for you as it uses Litespeed cache, Cloudflare CDN and has an uptime rate of 99.9%.
2. Pick up a lightweight Theme that loads blazing fast
A theme is one of the crucial factor on WordPress speed. A theme is built with widgets, sliders and with complex structure that causes it to load immediately. There are many themes in the market but when speed matters, there is no competitor to Astra. It is built in Vanilla JavaScript not with jQuery which ensures fast loading. It is extremely lightweight as it requires less than 50 KB of resources and it loads in less than 0.5 seconds.
If you don’t want to take a headache about building websites and become confused about plugin selection, Astra has a Growth Bundle plan for you also. It offers ready-made websites and includes all plugins that are used to build those sites.
3. Install minimum plugins and delete unnecessary ones
Don’t overwhelm yourself with too many plugins.
WordPress site functionalities are based on plugins. Beginners and small business owners are prone to install too many plugins on their site. The result is deadly for them. Sites load slowly or even crash. Try to pick only the bare essential plugins and delete others.
4. Use a Cache plugin
Use a cache plugin like WP-Optimize. It delivers your web page to customer browser quickly. It can also compress your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. It also sends minimum requests to server and Time to First Byte(TTFB) is relatively low.
5. Try CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) reduces distance between users and website resources through geographically distributed servers. It also optimize hardware and software and reduce file sizes. CDN is now widely used by big companies to manage website performance during heavy traffic. You can use StackPath, Sucuri CDN or Cloudflare for best experience.
6. Optimize imageÂ
Too large images and too many images, both kills the speed for wordpress sites. Heavy images consume lots of Bandwidth while loading. Uploading too many images increase your web page size that results slow loading. Using an image optimizer like EWWW IMAGE Optimizer can relief the pain. You can alternatively use Optimole.
7. Data base optimization
Every day, your site is getting enriched with lots of data. You inject data to your site as well as your visitors and customers. They leave comments, personal information etc. WordPress also stores post revisions, trash contents and auto drafts. All these result in creating a large Database and thus lead to slow website. It is possible to clear the database manually. But if you feel uncomfortable doing manual changes, use a plugin like WP-Optimize.
8. Enable GZIP compression
Dont panic watching the word GZIP. It is a free software under GNU project to compress data and transfer them quickly over the internet. When there are large data requests from browser, GZIP compresses the request in to a small zip file and sends it to the browser. The browser then instantly decompresses the content. As a result we can experience fast loading content.
You can either enable GZIP compression manually or use a plugin that supports GZIP compression.
Article to read
9. Follow UX patterns optimized for core web vitals
Use your carousels, fonts and images as per core web vitals. Many use banners and notices on their site. You will miss visitors attention if your First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint delay. Be careful to embed third party content like video players, social media feeds,maps and advertisements. Keep your website design simple with easy navigation. Complex designed sites load slow.
Article to read
10. Host video offsite
Adding videos takes a lot of space and bandwidth on WordPress. It increases hosting cost and slows down the site heavily. So, never try to upload videos to your WordPress site.Â
The alternate way to uploading is embedding videos and we suggest you to follow this golden rule.
Host your videos on YouTube or any other video hosting platforms and share the video just by pasting the video URL in your blog posts.
Two ultimate recommended articles
-
28 Ways To Speed Up WordPress
A detailed, Actionable guide to Speed up WordPress from WPastra
-
Fast Load Times
Techniques for improving site performance from web.dev
Conclusive Words
There are many options left to speed up WordPress. I have only curated the most important and practised techniques that can be easily followed by nonprofessionals. Of course, you will have to put some effort to implement these steps. But you will be highly rewarded when your website loads blazing fast.
Please feel free to comment below about your experience and let me know about your suggestions.
Disclosure: Our team writes about stuff we think you’ll like. We aim to highlight the products and services you might find interesting, and if you buy them, we may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our partner.
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