Best Strategies to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

by JONATHAN PAUL Jonathan Paul working at PHPProgrammers, a leading

Want to build a speedy and high performing site with WordPress? Then here are the strategies shared by an expert WordPress Developer to boost a site’s performance, speed, and quality.

Speed or the loading time is one of the parameters of the search algorithm. Speeding up a WordPress site must be a priority as the loading time and speed of a site can either break or make your online business. The speed of a WordPress site also determines the site ranking in the SERPs.

What is the first thing that a user or a visitor notices or considers when he or she opens a site? It’s the loading time. It makes the first impression and hence must be considered as one of the most essential aspects during the site development process.

A high-performing site must not take more than 3 to 4 seconds to get loaded. And a site takes as long as 10 seconds or more then you need to speed it up.

Now comes the question, how to speed up a WordPress site?

To speed up a WordPress site, you need to consider and work upon many aspects like the theme you choose, the host, the plugins you use, etc.

A skilled WordPress developer has shared a few tips to fasten your WordPress site below.

Choose a quality hosting provider:

Choosing a quality service provider is important. If you do not host your site on a good server, there will be a negligible chance of ending up with a fast site.

There are many good hosting providers when you are working with WordPress. And the best thing is that all these WordPress service providers offer customised hosting packages at reasonable prices.

Choose a lightweight theme:

The theme you are choosing for your WordPress site can have an impact on the loading time or speed. WordPress themes come with many dynamic elements, widgets, sliders, and social icons. But you need to remember that too many elements and higher page size can reduce the speed of the site making the site heavier. Hence, choosing a lightweight theme can work the best and minimise the loading speed of a WordPress site.

Use a caching plugin:

WordPress comes with a plethora of plugins. But, out of those, choosing a caching plugin can help you to improve your site’s speed and performance remarkably. All you need to do is install and set up the plugin properly.

And, always remember to uninstall or deactivate the unnecessary plugins. This is because keeping too many plugins activated can make the site heavier, which, in turn, can make the site go slow.

Optimise images:

If you use too heavy and high-resolution images, your site may take more time to load and run. This is why it becomes essential to optimise images and graphics. Choose clear and lightweight images for your WordPress site. This is one of the key tips to enhance your site’s speed and quality. Decrease the file size, crop images, and ensure to use images in the JPEG format.

Optimise the database as well:

Keeping your database optimised and clean is another significant factor you need to consider to boost your site’s speed. As your site grows older, more number of unnecessary files, data, and comments get accumulated, which increases the database size and makes the site heavier thereby increasing the loading time. This is the reason why optimising the database becomes a must.

Use a Content Delivery Network that is a CDN:

Every business owner would like people visiting the site from different regions of the world. There are many CDNs that help to speed up the loading time for the maximum number of visitors from all over the world. The main function of a CDN is to run a WordPress site from different locations around the globe. Hence, using a CDN can be a smart strategy.

So, these are the best tips to enhance a WordPress site’s speed. Keep these in mind before you get started or while building a site with WordPress.

Jonathan Paul is one of the most experienced WordPress developers of PHPProgrammers, a reputed software development company in Australia. The author has written this article to help out developers end up with speedy and high-performing websites with these smart strategies.