As we know WordPress is the one of the biggest content management systems for making blogs,
website and even complex websites, thanks to the WordPress community of WordPress developers
which provides best plugins and themes for various features. In this post we are sharing some tips to
speed up your WordPress website as Google also emphasize much on user experience.
Website speed is very important as the attention span of a user is getting lesser each day in this digital era, so as webmasters we need to make our users experience as good as possible by making our website load fast, without error and with a good user interface.
WordPress is very easy platform to create a simple website, you dont need any coding experience to make a website with this CMS. However, still there are few webmasters or newbies struggling to build a better and responsive website on wordpress. Having a greate website design can boost your business performance thatswhy most of the webmasters prefer wordpress to create good designs. For newbies its always challanging because they dont have much knowledge about designing and other technical things. In this case its always recommended to hire any good web design company.
What impacts website speed and performance
Website loading speed can decrease by various reasons, such as overall web page size, no of http
requests made while opening the web page, errors on a page etc. All of these things impact the loading time of a website and even a small thing can increase the load time by 2-3 sec which is huge when it comes to user experience on a slower network.
Best practices for improving website loading speed
- Optimize images – Since on every website we use images to make our website look good, but
these images also add up huge data to be downloaded while a request is being made to server
while opening the website. So in order to optimize images, we can user plugins such as
shortpixel optimizer, smush.it etc, which automatically resizes the images while uploading and
also the images in media library. - Caching – There are multiple caching plugins for WordPress which adds caching functionality in WordPress website and makes it load faster using browser cache. Some of the most popular
caching plugins are WP fastest cache and autoptimise. - Minify CSS / JS / HTML – Since the theme which we install and the plugins we use in WordPress may have CSS / JS / HTML which is not minified, so there are multiple plugins which help us in order to minify these and reduce the overall page size of our webpage.
- Reduce number of http request or scripts loaded while opening a webpage – Since in WordPress we use multiple plugins and themes to build our website, there are changes that the plugins will add links to its supported JavaScript and cascading style sheet files in header or footer. For example, if you are using any contact form plugin in your wordpress website , there are chances that the JavaScript required for the contact form is added in header and is included in all the pages of your website. But since we do not require a contact form in home page, its just inflating the page size and http requests. So in order remove the JavaScript / CSS files being called while a specific page is called, there is a great plugin which can be used which is Asset cleanup. Using Asset cleaup plugin we can selectively enqueue the JavaScript and CSS files which are not required to be called on a specific page.
- Enable Lazy loading – Lazy loading is also a feature which can be integrated in your website
which improved the website loading time by substantial amount. - Check unused CSS – After all the optimizations, there are some other optimizations such as
checking unused CSS and JS which Is harder to implement as compared to other optimizations.
There are services such as critical CSS which helps you find out the CSS which is unused and
eradicate that CSS which was a bloat for the web page. This can also be done manually using
chrome developer toolbar / console and while loading the page in coverage mode, it shows the
amount of CSS being covered and the unused CSS also. So anyone can easily remove the unused
CSS and reduce the page bloat. - Switch to server with better TTFB – TTFB stands for time to first byte, which is important as it
drastically changes the performance of your website. There are multiple hosting companies for
example Siteground, Bluehost etc, which are having very less TTFB and also provide supercacher for great loading speeds of website. - Use a content delivery network – There are many CDN providers such as Max CDN, cloudfare
etc, which provides CDN services which in turn reduces the load time for a website. This also
improved the website load time drastically by reducing the load on main server.
Also kindly ensure that your website doesn’t have any errors for mixed content or scripts file not found to make sure your website loads fast and you provide the best user experience to all your visitor without any hassle.
Digit MK 