Unfortunately, almost all websites slow down over time. And some even start out that way. You need to utilize the best ways to improve WordPress site speed. Because you can’t afford to waste a second on the internet.
Speed is important, especially when considering loading times. You’ll probably notice the negative impacts right away if your WordPress site is slow and makes users wait for a short while. Poor search rankings, declining conversions, and increased bounce rates are all evident.
The WordPress platform has many choices for optimizing your site to make it more dependable and quick. This tutorial will outline the steps you may take to improve website performance and speed.
How to Measure Website Speed?
You can gauge the speed of your website using a variety of technologies. However, the majority of them are built around Google Lighthouse. It is an open-source, cost-free application that offers information on how well websites perform.
Let’s talk about some of the crucial metrics that Lighthouse uses to keep track of WordPress speed improvements. To begin measuring various metrics, you must first download and install the Lighthouse Chrome extension.
Alternatively, you can just browse the official site using Page Speed Insights and perform an audit there. As you can see from the chart below, we conducted an audit to better understand additional website performance parameters.
What affects WordPress website speed?
There are dozens of factors that could influence your website and WordPress speed.
1. File types and sizes
In general, it takes longer to load a page when there are more and larger files to load. Fillable forms, large images, and videos can all significantly slow down page loads.
2. Your web hosting plan
The type of package you select and the web hosting business you use can significantly affect how quickly your website loads. For instance, shared hosting is a popular choice among small business owners because of its price and simplicity.
However, shared hosting involves sharing server resources with other users. To minimize lags and service interruptions, larger organizations may wish to think about a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server.
3. Plugins
WordPress plugins are fantastic, but if your site contains a lot of outdated, poorly optimized, or simply too many plugins overall, it can significantly slow down your site.
Ways To Improve WordPress Site Speed
There are several suggestions you can use to enhance website speed very immediately if you’ve established that it is too slow.
1. Minimize HTTP requests
Every time a web browser looks for something on your website, such as an image, stylesheet, or script, an HTTP request is sent. This process will take more time with the more on-page components you have.
Use Chrome Developer Tools (simply visit your site, open the browser menu, and select More Tools > Developer Tools) to view the total number of HTTP requests made on your website. All you need to do is clean up your website if you discover that you have too many.
Owners of websites frequently discover that they have dozens of files that are either unnecessary or never used. Start by going through your plugins and themes and removing anything you aren’t using or that is out of date.
2. Keep WordPress up-to-date
WordPress regularly releases updates with new features, bug fixes, security patches, and other improvements. The same is true for plugins and themes; they make your website perform more effectively and help keep it from slowing down.
3. Reduce server response time
A helpful tool is Google Page Insights, which can inform you whether you need to speed up your server response time among other things. Make sure you’re using the most recent version of PHP if you run it and discover that your page isn’t loading quickly because this can have a significant impact.
Install a cache plugin next to clean up your database and look for photographs and videos that are taking too long to load. Last but not least, confirm that your hosting company is giving you access to sufficient server resources to fulfill the resource demands of your website and/or plugins.
4. Analyze your JavaScript code
The majority of website owners using WordPress hosting won’t need to comprehend JavaScript in great detail, but understanding what it is and how it functions is still useful. The JavaScript code that runs on your website manages a lot of the interactive components.
Although this code is required, it may directly affect how quickly your page loads. JavaScript parsing is a technique that many web developers use.
This merely means that they will shift the JavaScript to the bottom of the page so that the top-level information will load more quickly. In a way, it hides the poor speed and provides the user with content to view right away while waiting for the remainder of the page to load.
5. Optimize images
In most situations, image optimization is a rapid and effective long-term solution. Your website’s load times will increase as you add more images to it. The size of the photographs you’re displaying follows the same rules.
The good news is that you can make adjustments to your photos without lowering their quality. You might be able to optimize the photographs on your own if you’re experienced with GIMP or Photoshop.
You might also think about offloading your image files to the WordPress CDN or compressing them using a WordPress plugin. These methods can increase your WordPress site’s speed immediately without lowering its overall quality.
Using a WordPress plugin to automatically compress any image you post to your website is an additional method that requires no more effort on your side.
It’s also important to note that WordPress gives you a variety of picture size options when you add images to your site. Regardless of whatever one you decide works best, always start small.
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