Best Ways to Speed up Your Business WordPress Website

by Andrew Bagel-Brown Business and Marketing

Ever since Google announced a few years ago that website speed matters for ranking your WordPress website then website owners have taken this factor very seriously and all are giving first priority to the website loading speed.

Page loading time matters because users search for something, and if they do not find it, they quickly leave off your website before complete page loading.

Because of the slow loading website, your website will be faceless in conversion rate and less traffic. So in this post, we will discuss a few aspects that should be taken care of for speeding up your WordPress website.

First of all, let us consider some plugins that are compatible with most of the professional free WordPress themes so that after creating a website, you can check the speed of your WordPress website.

These plugins will help you by providing you with the results of your website. And you will get the idea of how fast your website is working. Some examples include, GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest.

Some aspect that needs to be considered to speed up your website

Select a fast web hosting service

Whenever a visitor lands on your website homepage, the browser they are using sends a request to the server to showcase the page they are looking for. Thus, the total number of times taken to fetch the results actually influences how much time your visitors will require waiting. It should not take more than 3 seconds to load the website.

If visitors need to wait more than 3 seconds, they will never come back.

Therefore, while choosing the host, you should check which type of hosting you would be required. You would require shared hosting or look for dedicated WordPress hosting.

The cost is different for both the hosting, so you need to check its features and functionality as per your business need. We would recommend going with SiteGround if you are looking for a reliable solution.

A good hosting site will also help you take care of additional business factors such as your business email address and email management, site security and performance upgrades.

Use Light and Fast WordPress free themes

The theme plays an important role in page speed. Most website owners do not prefer to update the WordPress theme regularly, which can harm your website. Therefore, it is essential to select a template that satisfies your need plus which loads faster.

According to the rule of thumb, it is better for you to select minimalistic features and light-weighted themes. You can choose from free WordPress themes if you are a beginner and start creating a website for a small scale business.

Choose proper plugins

There are so many developers who create a third party plugin to extend the website functionality. Most of the plugins from third-party developers are not for free, they are paid ones. For fast loading forms, Consider WP Forms.

If you would like to get free plugins, then you can visit wordpress.org/plugins/. They have more than 50,000 plugins listed for establishing any type of task that you dream of. Make sure that you are only adding those plugins that you are in need of.

Fewer plugins will result in a quick loading website, and a large number of plugins will result in lower speed and performance. Do not forget to update the plugins you are using.

Health check and troubleshooting plugins will help you by checking if all your WordPress plugins are working properly or not.

Improve your WordPress database

WordPress database is what keeps all your website data in the background. It stores all website data including comments, posts, pages, user registration, history, setting, etc.

When a visitor visits your website, they actually search for a post or a page that gets fetched from your WordPress database. Data gets generated by users who take some action on your website, such as like, share, comments, upvotes, purchase, lead generation, etc.

The website page loading can be increased because of two factors. Your website database has grown too much in size, or your data can be fragmented by cycles of data entry.

Therefore, it is important to optimize your WordPress database by removing spam comments, old posts, drafts, trash, etc. WP-Optimize plugin will help you in optimizing your WordPress database, and it will improve your website speed in some instances.

Use CDN

CDN is a content delivery network. With analysis by HTTP Archive, it states that a WordPress website weighs 2.3 in the year 2020. If you add these all resources to CDN, a person from any corner of the world can load your website from a server. Thus, your website loading time will be reduced. KeyCDN is one of the best alternatives for website owners.

Images should be ready for your website

In the above point, we have discussed CDN to deliver clients' requests in minimum time. Now you have to look for resource optimization. The website gets heavy because of the number of images and other content loaded on your websites. Images occupy most of the space of a website page.

Therefore, you should always optimize the images for the best performance and speed.

Image Checks

Check if you have uploaded images in the proper size. Like you can't use the same logo to add it on the favicon. Both require different sizes. So you should resize the logo first and upload it in a smaller version.

The next example is of JPG and PNG both are used for different purposes which have different features thus you should check what is required and then choose the size of images according to that.

Image Optimization

After adding all images make sure that images are optimized properly. You can use Imagify to optimize the images in real-time. After optimizing the images the quality will not change it will remain the same.

You can also try ImageOptim or search for any other suitable plugin from wordpres.org.

Static files should be managed efficiently

You can minimize the size of your scripts and StyleSheets. It means you should remove those files which are not in need. Such as unused code, whitespaces, comments and more.

You can do it manually or you can use Minifier to perform the search. WP Super Minify is also another best alternative solution for it.