Speed is not simply a perk in the modern, fast-paced online world; it is a requirement. We’re here to help you optimize your WordPress website and make it blazingly fast using some tried-and-true tricks. So, let’s prepare to make our website a loading machine, whether you’re a web developer, blogger, or businessperson. The Web Venture will walk you through tried-and-true methods including caching, database tinkering, and picture optimization. Let’s get started.
Better Hosting Provider
First and foremost, our selection of a web hosting service is one of the most important factors. It determines how quickly our website loads. We should always choose a hosting service with a solid reputation and a track record of reliability, one that provides a stable infrastructure, quick server response times, and adequate resources. Shared hosting may be the most cost-effective option, but if speed and performance are priorities for our website, we should consider upgrading to managed WordPress hosting or a Virtual Private Server (VPS), which would be completely our private server.
Caching
Caching is an established method that lessens the stress on servers and speeds up the time it takes for pages to load. Website caches can stretch the loading time of our website. One solution to this is using plugins that can clear up your caches. We need to install a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.
Optimize Images
There’s no getting around it: picture size has a significant impact on how quickly a WordPress site loads.
As a result, optimizing images is essential if we want WordPress to load faster for us. Of course, we can do everything manually, which may be sufficient for a little job. However, if our WordPress site is of reasonable size and we intend to expand it, manually optimizing photos may become unnecessarily time-consuming. Fortunately, plugins are available for almost anything you can think of, including picture optimization.
Don’t upload videos directly to WordPress
The issue with videos is that their file sizes are typically enormous. Consider the fact that we just discussed optimizing pictures to speed up WordPress. Consider that photos are measured in megabytes and kilobytes, yet videos can frequently exceed gigabytes in size. Fortunately, there is a simple solution for us. We can publish our videos to an external video site like YouTube or Vimeo. Then we can copy the embed code from any third-party video site we published our video to and paste it into our article. If we intend to include videos on our pages, this is an absolute must to ensure that our WordPress site loads quickly.
Keep the Site Up to Date
WordPress, as a well-maintained open-source project, is constantly updated. Each update will include not only new functionality but also fixes for security flaws and problems. Your WordPress theme and plugins may also receive regular upgrades. As a website owner, you are responsible for utilizing the most recent HTML version, the most recent WordPress version, and the most recent WordPress themes and plugins. Always use the most recent versions of these things to improve performance, keep your site secure, patch issues, and ensure every feature and tool works properly.
PHP version
PHP is the scripting language used by WordPress to execute on our web server. That means it is the very basement of your Website; it holds everything together, we could think of it as the “mold” of our WordPress site. PHP releases updates on a regular basis to improve performance. The most recent PHP release can always be found on the official PHP homepage. Unfortunately, the default WordPress settings do not always make it as simple to determine which version of WordPress our site is running. The best way to find out is to go to the web hosting control panel and look at the version there. However, sometimes this process can be too technical, so as a backup, we can always choose another option, that is to contact our host’s support team.
Database Optimization
WordPress frequently autosaves everything, which is a positive sign, but the problem is that, as a result, the database will quickly load up with hundreds of post modifications, trackbacks, pingbacks, unapproved comments, and discarded stuff. Cleaning out our database manually with phpMyAdmin can be complicated and destructive especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. For a person like not much a techie, installing a plugin to complete this task is the safer option. WP-Optimize, Advanced Database Cleaner, and WP-Sweep are several plugins that can help us optimize our database.
These plugins clean away the database’s trash on a regular basis, keeping the database efficient and loaded only with what needs to be preserved. However, we have to make sure that we are always keeping a backup of our database before making any changes to it. It is one of the most effective methods for speeding up a WordPress site.
Gzip Compression
The smaller the size of our website, the faster it will load. GZip compression can cut the size of our website’s content by up to 70%. Because of the reduction in bandwidth, a website that has been compressed loads faster. When users visit our website, their browser will unzip the files and display the contents. This way of sending content from the server to the browser is significantly more efficient and saves a significant amount of time.
Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript
First, let us have a breakdown of what these terms mean.
HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the meaning and structure of web content.
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML. CSS decides the look and feel of a website.
Javascript: You’ve probably heard about Javascript thousands of times already. It’s a programming language that is widely used all over the world for web development and other programming activities as well.
While HTML, CSS, and Javascript are required to develop and run your WordPress site, if not optimized, they might cause our website to be rather laggy. As a result, experts urge that you always minify our HTML, CSS, and JavaScript scripts. Minifying code has no effect on how a website works; it simply removes unneeded code and shortens variable and function names. As a result, your website’s load times and bandwidth usage are reduced. So, if your website isn’t already using minified codes, minify the code quickly to increase WordPress speed.
Some of the strategies we have mentioned to increase WordPress speed may be familiar to you guys already. If this is the case, you are already on your way; nonetheless, try out the other ideas stated that you are not currently implementing on your site. If you follow the procedures, you should see significant improvements in your website’s loading speed and WordPress performance. A fast-loading website offers a better user experience, and a better user experience can lead to increased income. As a result, we should never underestimate the significance of our website’s speed.
