After reading the title, many of you would have been getting following questions in your minds:
Why you need to speed up your site? Or,
Is page load time important factor in search engine rankings?
We all want that our websites should be responsive and SEO friendly. Page loading speed is counted as a major factor that play important role in enhancing your search engine ranking. It is important for your SEO. It influences everything from bounce rate, traffic, user satisfaction, conversion rates to profits ultimately. If you leave this factor unchecked, your WordPress website becomes slower over time. After accumulating data, it gets complex and less efficient. Websites with more response time are less preferred by users and hence affects the business. So, it is very necessary to consider this factor while getting a website developed.
Here, in this article, we will have a look at few ways to speed up the WordPress website.
Why website speed is so important?
You should be concerned about website’s responsiveness if it does not load within few seconds. It matters a lot as most of the internet users are extremely impatient and if the site does not load in few seconds. They quickly switch over to the other one. It is also counted as ranking factor. Slow loading site enhances bounce rate and drops the site ranking down in major search engines.
What are the main factors that affect Page loading speed?
There are 3 main factors that affect site loading speed. These factors are as follows:
- Server and hosting technology
How quickly a page loads, depends on the server the site is hosted on. There are three different types of hosting servers such as Dedicated, Shared and Virtual private server. Let’s talk about all these three hosting types:
- Dedicated hosting: It means you have one server entirely for your use and no one else is sharing that with you.
- Virtual private server: It is like a shared hosting, but in this type of hosting the server resources are equally allocated among the hosted websites. Number of sites hosted are less as compared to shared hosting.
- Shared hosting: In this type of hosting, your site lies on the same server where number of other sites are also hosted and shares resources like RAM and processing power with all the other sites.
The hardware and software used in these servers are also important. You should also check whether your server uses latest version of various web technologies, PHP and HTML or not. In addition to these factors, you should also consider factors like available memory, SSD hard drives and much more. Server location is also important, if it is closer to the visitors requesting your blog, then site will load faster.
- WordPress and its components
Software that powers your site also influences the loading speed. In WordPress the pages are created dynamically. PHP application pulls data from a MySQL database and generates code (HTML) from templates and deliver it to browser. These are the extra steps that makes your site slow. In addition to it, the use of Plugins and themes also cause the site to slow down.
- The End User’s Device
Nowadays many users access your site on mobile. Less processing power and slow internet connection can also be the main reason that make your site take more time to load.
How to test site speed?
There are so many excellent tools that allow you to test your site from different server locations as well. Some of them are:
10 amazing ways to speed up your WP site
Let us now talk about some ways to speed up the WP site.
- Invest in quality hosting
Your web hosting servers should be properly configured else they can hurt website loading speed. So always invest in proper hosting.
If you want to increase the site performance, you have to choose good host for your site. You need not to stick in between cheap offers. Hosting is like “You get what you pay for”. You should avoid shared hosting as we mentioned above. Shared hosting may seem affordable but it comes with various disadvantages such as frequent downtime and extremely slow speed during high traffic time.
Risk of ‘bad neighbors’ on server becomes the main reason of slowing down your site. You should go for VPS hosting as it offers good balance of cost, comfort and speed.
Unlimited visits and page views can slow down your site, so better choose the right host. Don’t go for shared hosting and rely on its services. Choosing dedicated hosting is not advisable as it is recommended to those who dive deep in technologies. You should choose VPS servers that will cost you around $25 to $50 per month. These servers are more capable than dedicated servers. Managed WordPress hosting can also be a good option to look into.
- Use up to date web technology and latest WP version
You need to keep your site’s core technology up to date in order to speed it up. You should go for latest version of PHP, HTML and other web technologies. Some sites that run on older version may face slow loading issues. You should improve version to improve the speed of site and to make it more secure.
- Go with solid theme or framework
The default WordPress theme (Twenty Fifteen Framework) is speedy and lightweight. But sometimes you need theme or framework loaded with features that may impact your site speed. These themes look impressive but they may be poorly coded and impact the speed. You should use simple theme and customize it using quality Plugins. Check our rock solid themes which are light weight and lightning fast.
- Image optimizations
Sometimes when images are not optimized for web, can be the main cause of slowing down your site. If you find any tool or image optimizer to reduce the image size without affecting the quality of images, then you will be able to optimize images automatically. There are some free Plugins that can process all your images automatically. WP-SmushIt can be the best plugin to do so. For more information about this plugin explore the below given link:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/
- Home Page Optimization
You need to optimize Home page of your website so that it can load quickly. You can do it by following given steps:
- Reduce the number of posts on home page (Just show 5 or 6 posts)
- You need not to show full post, just show excerpts
- Unnecessary sharing widgets can impact speed so remove them from home page (include them in posts)
- Remove inactive widgets and Plugins
Just have focused and clean homepage design. It helps page look good and load quickly.
- Avoid uploading videos directly to your site
You can directly upload videos on your site. However, it is advisable to avoid this practice. Hosting videos increase your backup sizes and cost you bandwidth. In such cases, your hosting provider may shut down your site.
Sometimes it becomes difficult to restore WP from backup
You can utilize video hosting service such as dailymotion, vimeo and youtube as they have enough bandwidth for videos.
You will also find an built-in video embed feature in your WP site, that allow you to copy and paste URL of your video directly into post. It will automatically embed.
- Monitoring Set Up
There are so many tools that offer automatic monitoring. You just need to get registered to them. You will get notified by an email when your site slows down. You should invest in such tools like PingDom.
- Decrease server requests
When browser asks any type of resource from server like an image, script or style sheet, server request is generated. These server requests should be as few as possible as more requests will increase the time required to load your site.
Here are some ways to reduce them:
- Reduce unnecessary external resources like fonts
- Deactivate Plugins if they are no longer of use
- Reduce number of images to your site
- Split longer posts to pages
- Don’t show full posts, just show excerpts
- Reduce the number of posts shown on webpage
GTMetrix and pingDom are the useful tools that provide you a detailed list of server request and how long these requests need to complete.
- Use a CDN
You can use a content delivery network (CDN) as you know server location is very important. If your server is far away from the visitor, it can take longer time to transmit your site data. But this problem can be resolved by using CDN. It hosts your static files on many servers, distributed across the globe, at once. Whenever someone requests to explore your WordPress website, he/she can get it from the closest location. It helps cut down downloading time. There are so many such services available like Cloudfare, Amazon Cloudfront and MaxCDN.
- Optimize WP database
You can use WP-Optimize plugin that lets you optimize your database (tables, drafts, post revision and spam) to reduce overhead. You can also install and activate WP-DB-Manager plugin that schedules DB optimization schedule dates.
So, it’s time to wave Good Bye to slow loading WP site. Just follow the steps mentioned in this guide and you can rest assured that your site will not slow down. Does not seems your cup of tea ? No Problem check out Maintenance Service , we do provide WordPress Speed optimisation Service.