How To Speed Up WordPress Website

In this day and age businesses need to go digital. The days of throwing a Hail Mary at traditional marketing is nearly coming to an end. A business that wants to be successful needs to be online, period. Social Media aside, having a decent website is a great way to help people know about the business. And the easiest way to get your own website up and running is to opt for the tried and tested WordPress platform. While there are alternatives to WordPress like Wix, Weebly, Site123, etc. WordPress remains the platform of choice for many businesses and CMSs, including personal blogging sites even in 2020.  According to hostingtribunal.com, as much as 32.5% of all sites today are WordPress based! No wonder knowledge of WordPress forms part of most digital marketing practical training modules.

(Source – ArtDriver, Year – 2020)

But having a website for the sake of it is not enough. Websites must be fast and functional while offering eye-candy visualizations to attract and retain customers, specially the Gen Y and Gen X lot. As per a study from 2000 to 2016, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds. What does this mean for website owners?

In reality there is very little time to show the content to the users and convince them to stay on the site. Faster loading times mean users will potentially leave a website before it even loads, and think twice before visiting it the next time. As per a StrangeLoop case study that involved Amazon, Google, and other larger sites, a one-second delay in page load time can lead to 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and even a 16% fall in customer satisfaction! In digital marketing practical training modules, there are normally modules in WordPress which teach you how to optimize your WordPress website for faster loading times.

(Source – StrangeLoop, Year – 2020)

In addition, search engines (like Google) rank websites with fast-loading times higher than the slow-loading ones. So, if a website owners want to improve their SERP (Search engine results page) results, improving speed should be one of the main priorities.

This begs the question, how to make your very own WordPress website load faster without having to sacrifice on JavaScript-heavy content and visuals. Read on! This knowledge will hold you in good stead if you end up enrolling in digital marketing practical training courses in future. 

First things first, before any kind of optimization, the current load time for your website must be checked to gauge where you stand. Keep in mind that this speed may differ from page to page, as it depends on various factors, namely:

• the size of that particular page,
• how many requests it generates,
• whether it is cached or not,
• what kind of content (static or dynamic) it hosts.

In order to check the speed of a website, the following three free online web based testing tools are used frequently:

• WebPageTest.org
• Tools.Pingdom.com
• PageSpeed Insights

The last site i.e. PageSpeed Insights doesn’t really report the page loading time, but does highlight the page elements that can be tweaked to speed up WordPress.

We present below some curated tips to cut down on those annoying loading times on WordPress websites.

Choosing the best possible web hosting provider

Unsurprisingly, the major factor that influences the speed of a website is the hosting of your WordPress website.

Shared hosting tends to deliver a poorer performance because you are sharing the same server space with countless other websites, and you never know how much resources others are using. Also, there’s no telling how well the servers are optimized.

Thankfully, the web-hosting industry has progressed with technology, and the prices of cloud hosting providers have been slashed time and again. Nowadays, dedicated cloud servers from SiteGround, DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, and even Google Compute Engine can be purchased at often discounted prices. But the downside is setting those servers up can be a daunting task as the users are required to set them up from scratch.

Using lightweight WordPress theme/ framework

WordPress themes with a lot of dynamic elements, widgets, sliders, social buttons and other such shiny elements are pretty appealing to visitor’s eye. But mind you, stacking up too many elements and higher page sizes will definitely cause your web server to take a beating.

So the best bet here is to use lightweight themes. One option is to go for one of the default WordPress themes. Another is to try out something like Neve.

(Neve Theme Basic Look, Source – Neve)

Check out a list of the best 50 WordPress themes if you’re interested.

Reducing image sizes

These days, loads of images on a website are a necessary evil, as in they contribute to size increment of a given web-page but at the same time make the web-page look good, so cannot be done away with. However, there’s a way out. The funda is to reduce the size of the images without compromising on the quality, technically called as “lossless compression”.

Manually optimizing the images using Chrome PageSpeed Insights extension, Photoshop or other such tools will burn a lot of time. Here’s where WordPress plugins come to the rescue. There are plugins available for nearly everything you can think of, including image optimization. The ones worth mentioning are:

• Optimole
• WP Smush
• EWWW Image Optimizer

Using any of the above mentioned plugins on a WordPress site will significantly reduce image sizes, thus improving the loading times of the website.

Deactivating/ uninstalling plugins

Keeping a lot of unused or rarely used, or even downright unwanted plugins on a WordPress website will add a tremendous amount of junk to the web files. Moreover, it will also increase the size of the mandatory backup and put a huge load on the server resources while backup files are being generated. Thus it is best practice to get rid of the plugins that are not used regularly, and also to also look for alternate methods to use third-party services for automating or scheduling tasks (like sharing of the latest posts to social media).

IFTTT or Zapier are two web services that help in automating such tasks and reduce the burden on the website and server resources.

Using modern caching and a caching plugin

WordPress caching plugins (e.g. W3 Total Cache) have been there for quite a while. Their main goal is to make the complex task of adding caching regulations to a WordPress website elements easier. Combining such plug-ins with advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish could help increase the loading speed of the website and ultimately speed up WordPress considerably.

Keeping external scripts as few as possible

External scripts on WordPress web pages contribute a lot to the total loading time as extra chunks of data have to be loaded every time. Thus, it is advisable to use a as few external scripts and functionally possible. You should include only the essentials such as tracking tools (like Google Analytics) or commenting systems (like Disqus). In short, refrain from indulging in additional scripts just for aesthetic purposes.

Reducing JavaScript and CSS file sizes

One run of your WordPress website on Google PageSpeed Insights tool, and you will probably be notified about minimizing the size of your CSS and JavaScript files. By reducing the number of CSS and JavaScript calls and the size of those files, the site-loading speed can be improved significantly.

There are some plugins that will help you achieve this goal; the most popular being the Autoptimize that can help in optimizing CSS, JavaScript and even the HTML of your WordPress website. Now that’s easy.

We wrap up today’s blog in the hope that you found our tips useful. If you’re interested to learn WordPress to set up your own website, look no further! We have economical digital marketing practical training offerings, which you can check our here.

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