Gone are the days when you find yourself sitting down in front of the computer staring for ages at a blank screen, waiting for a WordPress website to load fully and appear in front of you. If you’re still struggling with this issue, then a great solution is to open your browser and type the keywords “How to speed up your WordPress website?” I’m sure you’ll find plenty of such solutions.
Being a WordPress researcher and copywriter, I read lots and lots of content and some time back, I even struggled with this problem while setting up my blog. I needed an optimized solution which not only improves speed but also my workflow.
How To Speed Up Your WordPress Website?
When it comes to speeding up your site, there are a lot of ways of doing so. But the real deal is to ensure that the method you’re using assists you in different zones. You must know that even Google prefer sites with reasonable web speeds and ranks them well. So, your ultimate goal should not be just speeding but also increased traffic levels and high ranking in search engines.
A code nerd would undoubtedly know the art of spinning around this issue with a few lines of HTML and PHP. But what about people not so good with the code? Here are some quick ways to speed up your website. This is not an ordinary list where you expect someone to list the plugin name with its description. Instead, I am going to discuss these plugins w.r.t. the functionality they offer.
Choose a Smart Caching Plugin
The concept of storing some specific parts of the website temporarily is termed as caching. Its sole purpose is to prevent the site from loading all over again each time a user visits the website. Optimizing web page speed via cache plugins has proved to be quite successful in the WordPress community. This fact is supported by some related plugins (both free and paid) which you can find in one go.
W3 Total Cache plugin is the most popular and free plugin of its kind. It powers more than a million websites including some influential names of the community like Smashing Magazine, Mashable, etc. Its features are not so user-friendly, and newbies find it difficult to understand the technical insights this plugin delivers. You can cache all the WordPress pages, database, and objects. Being WP-CLI supported, it can perform query string updating and a lot more. W3 Total Cache is fully compatible with CDN networks, dedicated and virtual private servers. You can read a lot more about its key features from here.
Talking about some paid solutions, then WP Rocket tops the list of best-selling cache plugins that not only boost web speed but also generate high traffic. The best part about WP Rocket is its user friendliness which makes it easy for anyone to handle and configure.
When compared to its free counterparts, WP Rocket performs page caching along with cache preloading to improve speeds and site ranking. The images get loaded only when you scroll down a page and not before. It produces static HTML, CSS and JavaScript files which cut down a major portion of web load time. To learn more about this plugin and its pricing model you can refer this link.
Compressing Image Size
If your site has static images, then these are the major contributors to increasing web page speeds. Image compression and lazy load techniques have been employed to handle images. The lazy load trick ensures that images load only when a user scrolls the cursor down and not before. You’ll hardly find any popular free plugin (except for Lazy Load and BJ Lazy Load plugins) offering this feature. However, paid solutions do offer it as a part of their service package.
Now when the question arises about image compression, WP Smush.it is the name you should look for. With over 400,000 active installs, this plugin strips off a major portion of unwanted details from images. It reduces the overall image file size, removes hidden, bulky information like unused colors without losing quality.
Optimizing Database By Cutting Down HTTP Requests
Just like images, if you have static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files then these will be loaded altogether each time a user visits your website. This means a large number of HTTP requests are catered. However, these can be significantly reduced if the number of objects on each web page gets minimized. People have employed minification techniques to achieve this bit of functionality. The WP Minify plugin has handled this issue to quite an extent by removing all the blank spaces from the code and combining all the JS and CSS files into a unified component.
Still a room always exist which can be filled wisely by optimizing the database tables. Developers can obviously do it in a few minutes manually via using the phpMyAdmin. But the option of working with plugins always exist.
The WP-Optimize plugin outclasses most of its counterparts. It is one of the best database cleaning and optimization tool. It removes the excessive post from your database. Apparently, your blog/website contains lots of posts but only a few of them are needed and important. The rest are just a burden and occupy extra space. Therefore, the WP-Optimize plugin deletes the unwanted content (spam and trashed comments, draft posts,etc. ), rather than just storing it as trash.
Use An Efficient Hosting Solution
Despite relying on the use of plugins and paying more heed to consolidate the software, you can take hold of the core and strengthen it. I am talking about the hardware of the website which is the hosting providers. Mostly, people know about shared hosting plans but are unaware of the fact that it cannot bear high traffic. So, to scale from medium to high traffic levels you should choose among the following:
- Virtual Private Hosting: For more tech savvy individuals
- Dedicated Hosting: For sites which have daily traffic in millions
- Managed Hosting: For sites who run an online business
If you’re looking for my recommendation, then SiteGround’s shared hosting plan is the best fit for beginners. Their services are quite handy which includes nearly 100% uptime, free daily backups and domain name registration.
But for the more professional lot, WPEngine is the best provider as they offer top notch services and super speedy websites.
Conclusion
I know nobody likes waiting long for web pages to load fully. These not only prevent people from visiting your website but also disturbs your indexing process. With all the hacks mentioned above, you can achieve improved levels of web page speed which benefit you in several ways.
[ecko_alert color=”gray”]Go through all these ways and try to implement in your websites. As usual, don’t hesitate to leave any questions or comments below, and I’ll aim to respond to each of them. You can even reach me out through my Twitter account.[/ecko_alert]
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