How to Make a Blazing Fast WordPress Website
Do you wish to speed up your WordPress website? Well, fast loading pages not only help with your WordPress SEO but also increases your page views and improves your user experience. On the other hand, a slow website can damage your brand reputation and eventually hurt your revenue. Here are some tips that can help you make a blazing fast WordPress website.
Select a Good Host
If you want to publish popular stuff, then a shared host might not be the best. In order to avoid such stress, you need to invest in a proper host plan. In addition, you need to choose a host with friendly staff who are also well versed in all the workings of WordPress. You can even move to a new server.
Optimize Your Images
While having a stunning web imagery is good, it might lead to a slow site. In order to ensure that WordPress loads faster, you should make sure you compress your images. You can install WP Smush to help you reduce the size of the images and remove any hidden metadata that might be taking up a lot of space.
Use Effective Caching Plugin
Most WordPress hosting services recommend using Caching plugins. While there are many WordPress plugins that can be very useful, you want to pick those specifically for caching if you want to improve your site’s performance. More so, all of them in WordPress.org are usually free and very easy to use. You simply need to install and activate them, and your page will start loading faster.
Run a Site Speed Diagnosis
Knowing how fast your website loads is very important towards boosting the speed of your website. If you install a plugin or move to new server and wants to see how it affects your website, then tracking speed is very important.
Use Content Delivery Network
Content delivery network, also known as CDN usually takes all the static files such as CSS3, Images, JavaScript, and allow the visitors to download them as fast as possible.
Choose Fast Lightweight Theme
Since not all WordPress themes are equal, you need to take the minimal approach by using a theme that only has the basic features to make it work well. If you want your theme to be attractive, search for beautiful and fast loading themes.
Optimize the Home Page
This is one of the easiest things that you can do to make sure that your homepage loads fast. You need to reduce the number of posts per page and do away with any unnecessary widgets on the home page. Also, remove plugins and widgets that you don’t need so as to remain with a clean and focused homepage.
Clear Up Your Database
After some time, your site may start accumulating unnecessary data that can end up slowing up your system. Thankfully, with regular clean-ups, you can increase your loading rate. You can use plugins such as WP-Optimize to help you with cleaning up your database. It will help you remove post-draft, post revisions, post spams and comments among others.
Remove Any Unused Data
After some time, you might start accumulating media or images that are no longer useful. You, therefore, need to remove them if you want to free up space.
Clean Up Your Code
In some cases, sites run poorly because the theme runs on some outdated code. If that’s the case and you haven’t changed your theme, you could consider getting a new one. Or if you want to keep the same look, you could ask a freelance developer to create another version of the same site that would run quicker.
You could also boost the site’s speed to a process called minification. With minification, you remove unwanted elements from the site’s source code without modifying their function. There are tons of apps like Autoptimize that can do that for you.
Move to a Dedicated Server
If you receive a lot of traffic at your site then you need to move to a new server. Although shared hosting is affordable, it can be troublesome. By using a dedicated server, you will ensure that your website is not shared on servers with malicious website or spammers. It’s therefore worth investing in a good hosting plan.
There you have it, how to make a blazing fast WordPress website. If you want to optimize your website, then go ahead and try out some of these techniques. Also, ensure that you test the speed of your website before and after so that you can know whether you’ve improved or not.