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What You Can Do to Increase Your WordPress Page Speed (5 Steps to Improve Your Site Speed)

Sep 6, 2023

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The slow loading of websites will negatively impact your company. A continuous stream of content have reduced the human attention span which means that users are bored faster than they have ever.

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If your website is taking time to load, prospective customers could simply move on to another site.

There are a few excellent strategies that you can employ to improve the speed of your WordPress site speed. Utilizing plugins and adhering to best practices can increase the speed at which your website loads and also keep fickle users on your page.

In this guide we'll examine five strategies to improve your WordPress speed. In addition, we'll discuss the factors that slow down your website and why quick loading times are so critical. Let's begin!

What Slows Down Your WordPress website's speed? (And Why Speed is Important)

Time to load a website refers to the time that it takes to show all of the content in its entirety. This content can include images video, text, or other elements.

The elements most likely to slow your website are:

  • Pictures
  • Videos
  • Slow plugins
  • Caching is not working.
  • External scripts

It penalizes slow websites and puts them on the bottom of the list of search results, making it harder for customers to find your site.

There is a cost-free instrument like the IsItWP speed test to check your WordPress website's performance.

Once you know your baseline, you can start making tweaks to improve the loading speed. You can also utilize this tool to perform tests throughout the process of updating and determine what methods are most effective on your site.

What can you do to improve your WordPress website's speed (5 Easy Ways)

If you're aware of the significance of the speed of your WordPress site's speed is, we'll look at some simple ways you can reduce your site's loading time.

1. Pick the right theme and add-ons.

Themes and plugins play an important role as parts of WordPress websites. They are the primary components. However, poorly designed themes and plugins may slow down your site significantly.

In selecting a new theme or plugin to use on your site, you'll need to

  • Look up user ratings and comments. This can give an idea of how well the plugin or theme performs for other users.
  • Find out if your theme or plugin have recently been updated. Tools that receive regular updates from their developers will be more reliable and are more likely to be optimized.
  • It is possible to test the performance of the staging site before and after adding the new tool, to see whether there is any noticeable drops.

2. Make Your Images

To reduce the effect of your media files, you can consider using an image optimization tool like ShortPixel. ShortPixel plug-in:

This plugin integrates into your WordPress website. It lets you optimize pictures of all file types, including PNG and JPEG. It's very easy to use, and it can be used to compress any images on your website with a single click.

You may utilize the ShortPixel plugin to improve images by going to the Media tab, then Bulk ShortPixel > Start Optimizing:

This tool is able to reduce all images within your WordPress library in one go.

It is also possible to consider using "lazy loading". This will stop your site from showing pictures until a user scrolls down and reaches the images. This can speed the loading process.

You can enable lazy loading by using the help of a plugin such as Smush:

After installing the plugin, all you have to do is navigate to the Smush menu > lazy load and then activate:

Once you activate lazy loading, you can modify various settings such as kinds of media, exclusions and the script's placement. Smush is also an excellent alternative to compress and reduce the size of images, even without using ShortPixel.

3. Make use of a Caching Plugin (or Host with built-in Caching)

Caching is a crucial process that helps your website load faster. It creates and stores copies of your site in a storage area known as a cache, so the entire website doesn't have to reload with every new user. It can access these saved site details for new users, so it will take much less time to load.

One of the easiest methods to cache your website is to use a plugin like the WP Super Cache. It uses a few different methods, including simple static files for general users as well as "super-cached" static file for experienced users.

The WordPress Super Cache to save your site's information via the Settings tab, then WP Super Cache > Caching on:

In this dashboard, you can change your cache settings, by going to the Advancedtab. In this tab, you have the option of choosing the users who are able to access cached content, as well as how the caches will last as well as whether or not you would like to make sure that your caches are delivered by an expert.

Its built-in caching is the best on the market, making it by far the fastest WordPress website host out there.

4. Make use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of servers spread across the globe. Each of them stores a cache of data for your site, and when a user goes to your site, they will receive the information from the CDN that is closest to them. Thus, your site will load a lot more quickly due to the fact that there's less geographic distance.

There are numerous CDN alternatives available, including Cloudflare. You can sign up for the paid subscription and then begin with this high-end CDN for your website to bring it more quickly to users.

5. Utilize Excerpts

If your site has blogs, you'll probably want to showcase your content. The problem is that displaying blog's posts in all their detail will slow down your website's speed. You can instead think about displaying snippets of your content on your website's landing pages.

As an example, you'll notice on the blog's landing page that the page doesn't display the entire blog posts. The page displays a couple of phrases from each and allows the visitor to click on the heading to read the rest:

Depending on your theme, you might need to modify your settings so that excerpts are displayed by navigating to Settings > Reading > For every article in a particular field, include > Summary:

Then, you can easily customize the excerpts of new posts by going to the Posts tab and clicking Add New. Within this page there is a button to select Post > Excerpt:

You can also compose a custom-written excerpt which is displayed in lieu of your entire blog. You can also include excerpts in your existing posts.

Conclusion

The slow loading of your website can be disastrous for your business. If customers leave the site, you could miss the opportunity to convert them. Therefore, optimizing your WordPress website's speed is among of the most crucial aspects you can accomplish.

To recap, these are just a few of the ways you can boost the quality of your WordPress performance:

  1. Reducing the size of your image files through the ShortPixel plug-in Consider lazy loading.
  2. Use the Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare to reduce loading time.
  3. Post excerpts from posts to speed up loading time.

Have you got any concerns regarding how you can improve your WordPress site's performance? Please let us know via the section of comments below!

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