How to Optimize WordPress Website for Speed?

wordpress speed

One of the main problems that website owners face is slow loading times and poor website performance which can affect website search engine ranking and lose valuable traffic. The website speed is crucial: imagine it as the horses during a race, trying to compete for the podium in the Breeders Cup results.

Many website developers fall in the same trap by building overly-complicated interface that has slow loading time and they experience traffic loss. There are couple of things that you can do to improve WordPress website speed and in this article we will go through some of them and find out how to optimize your website to deliver the perfect performance.

Choose good host

Your hosting partner is where all things start, which is why you have to do some research in order to select the better hosting option for your website. Website speed is directly affected by your hosting plan and the server you are on. There are different hosting methods such as shared server, cloud server, dedicated servers and much more. They have different capabilities and different prices for the plan. It is best if you start with the medium plan and select Cloud hosting and once you gain more traffic you can move to more advanced plans. Your hosting plan is also connected to your website downtime, so it is better to choose hosting that has higher up-time.

Stable Theme Framework

Themes with many different widgets, sliders and social icons that look incredibly appealing to the eye can make your server struggle and slow down website load time. It is always best to use themes with minimalistic approach that have only the necessary functions. It is important to build your website with speed in mind so you can show fewer posts on the homepage and less variety of small pages. WordPress default themes like Twenty Fifteen are perfect for starting a blog.

Multimedia optimization

One of the biggest factors that can slow down your website is your multimedia files such as large images and videos. Just because these kinds of elements have bigger size, they tend to take a lot of space on the server slowing down the website. If you like you can use manual image optimization with Photoshop or any other tool to lower the size of the file without compromising the quality. However, this will take a lot of time to do every single image or video. Fortunately, there are plugins that can optimize images like WP Smush, Optimole and etc. These are must-have plugins in order to improve load speed.

Minify CSS and JS files

If you put your website through analyze tool like Google PageSpeed Insights, you will probably get notification saying to reduce the number of CSS and JS calls as well as the size of those files. In order to optimize your website for speed you have to edit your CSS and JS manually, but it requires some knowledge about this particular problem. However, there are plugins that can take care of all the things mentioned such as Autoptimize and improve your website speed.

Use caching plugins

You have to use some sort of caching mechanisms that can help you improve the load speed of your website. There are many different advance chacing plugins such as W3 Total Cache that can be used to optimize elements on your website. These type of plugins have been around for a long time and they do an incredible job improving your website.

Use a CDN

If you run a website that has international properties and you get visitors from all around the world, site-loading speed can be different if it is accessed from different locations. Fortunately, Content Delivery Networks can help you maintain low loading speed everywhere in the world. A CDN will make a copy of your website in many different datacenters so whenever some user tries to access your page, they will receive a copy from the nearest location. MaxCDN and Cloudflare are one of the most popular CDN services.

These are some of the things that you can do in order to optimize your website for speed. Website responsiveness and speed are key elements for the success of every website which is why you have to make effort to improve your website performance.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —