Your website’s performance imparts the first impression about your business. It’s crucial to remember that you won’t get another chance when it comes to UX. Slow site loading speed is one of the most irritating things that will turn visitors off from your site. However, high-performance sites derive higher return visits, lead conversions, low bounce rates, more user engagement, superior ranks in search results, and better UX. On the other hand, slow sites will cost you huge losses as well as impaired reputation. Thus, by minimizing the page loading time you’ll positively affect marketing as well as sales processes. You’ll also get higher traffic and appeal to more prospective leads that can be converted into paying customers. In this blog, we will discuss some methods of WordPress Speed Optimization and boost page loading time.
Key Methods To Speed Up WordPress Site
After testing the speed of your site, you need to optimize it. There’re several ways to make your site perform faster. Here’s the list of the most effective methods to speed up the WordPress website.
Use a Content Delivery Network
A CDN is a stack of web servers dispersed across multiple locations that offer web content to end users as per their location. If you host the site on a single server, all users’ requests are delivered to the same hardware. Thus, the time required to process each request hikes up. In addition, the load time also increases if the user’s location is far away from the server. So, with CDN, user requests are forwarded to the nearest web server. Therefore, the content is quickly delivered to a user and a site operates much faster. Though it’s an expensive way, yet very effective for WordPress Speed Optimization.
Minimize the size of images
Everyone loves to see appealing images on a site. In the case of successful e-commerce sites, images are a crucial aspect. A lot of visual content, images, and graphics on your product pages boost user engagement. However, using more or large images can slow down a site. If you want to use more images, you must use images with small sizes. The best way to cut the image size without ruining its quality is to compress images using online tools tiny PNG, compress JPEG, etc. Another way to trim the image size is to use the HTML attributes that alter image size based on display properties.
Use fewer plugins
Plugins are the core elements of each site. They add particular features to the website. But, the more plugins are set up, the more resources are required to run them. For that reason, the site runs slower, and also security issues can occur. For WordPress Speed Optimization, it’s wise to keep on checking out the plugins from time to time and delete the useless plugins. You must run the performance tests to find out which plugins are hindering the speed of your site. The site speed not only depends on the number of plugins but also on their quality. So, avoid using plugins that load large scripts or generate a big stack of database queries.
Diminish the number of JavaScript as well as CSS files
If your website is stuffed with a lot of JavaScript as well as CSS files, it will lead to countless HTTP requests when site visitors want to access specific files. These requests are handled separately by the user’s web browser and slow down the site operation. So, if you reduce JavaScript and CSS files this will surely help in WordPress Speed Optimization. Try to group all JavaScript as well as CSS files into one. As a result, it’ll reduce the number of HTTP requests. There are a lot of tools for minification of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files swiftly. For instance, you can use Ajax minify, Script Minifier, Gulp, JS compress, and much more.
Apply Gzip Compression
Gzip Compression is a powerful method to minimize the size of files. It reduces the HTTP requests and lowers the server response time. Gzip compresses the files before delivering them to the web browser. On the user side, a web browser unzips the compressed files and displays the contents. This method works flawlessly with all files on your site. You can enable Gzip on your site by adding a piece of code or through a utility called Gzip.
Database optimization in CMS
Database optimization is an effective method of WordPress Speed Optimization. If you use a CMS armed with third-party plugins, the database size expands and your site runs slower. In the case of WordPress, the WordPress CMS stores comments, blog posts, and other info that occupy a lot of data storage. Each CMS needs its own optimization measures and also has many particular plugins. For WordPress, you can consider WP-Optimize to speed up a WordPress site.
Reduce Redirects
Website redirects create extra HTTP requests that impose a negative impact on site performance. We suggest keeping them to a minimum or excluding them entirely. At first, you should detect all redirects on your page by running a site scan. You can use tools like Screaming Frog to smoothly detect redirects. Then you must check if they serve a significant purpose and leave only the crucial ones while removing others.
The Bottom Line
Currently, users expect sites to load in less than 3 seconds. If you don’t meet this expectation barrier, you may lose a lot of potential customers as well as traffic. This will reduce your overall revenue. So, at Clap Creative, we suggest applying a simple yet powerful WordPress speed optimization approach:
a. Examine the key factors of site success considering conversion rate, online presence, and usability.
b. Test your existing site speed and prioritize the pages as well as features that you want to get the most attention.
c. Begin your optimization with the most speed-hindering aspects and focus on the pages that specify your conversion success the most.
Original Source: Must-Follow Methods For WordPress Speed Optimization
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