Your guide to improving WordPress site performance
You need to improve the speed of your WordPress site. Search engines have incorporated loading times into the ranking algorithm for sites. Slower loading pages will be ranked lower than quicker loading pages, which could affect traffic. Traffic and analytical data have also linked site loading speed. Sites that load quickly are more likely to have return visitors. With users showing affinity to sites with great performance metrics, top of which is the page loading time. Sites with online buyers can also be significantly affected by slow loading times, and it may affect your business’s profitability.
Speed optimization for your WordPress site can be carried out be specialized service providers who research, address, monitor and maintain your site’s performance index. If you are unable to take up their services. You may need to consider these options to improve the performance of your WordPress site.
Know how to test your site’s performance:
You need to research and identify the problem before you seek to address it. While these practices are great for your WordPress site’s performance, they may be redundant if not carried out thoroughly and effectively. In order to make all the right changes, you should be able to identify a performance problem.
Your site may not have a slow load time at all. When considering its performance, keep in mind the size of the page, the number of requests made and generated. Its cache status, and the type of content it is designed to host. Tools such as WebPageTest.org and Page Speed Insights will help you find out whether you need to improve the performance of your site.
Pick Better Web Hosting:
Shared hosting is popular because it is relatively better priced and offers little maintenance charges. It also offers unlimited features such as bandwidth and domains. While this is tempting for new users, and may be an ideal start off point, shared hosting can result in poor performance. The servers are not optimized for your website and are shared among a number of users. Aside from competing for resources, a negative response to one of the websites hosted on the same server will cause a drop in the SEO rankings of all the sites. These servers may be very sluggish as a result of high traffic.
You may prefer premium hosting services. While they are somewhat costly, they offer great service and guarantee better performance for your site during periods of large traffic.
Remove all Plugins that you do not Need:
Keeping unwanted plugins on your WordPress websites will add a tremendous amount of junk to your web files. Moreover, it will also increase the size of your backup and put an overwhelming amount of load on your server resources while generating backup files. It is better to get rid of the plugins that you don’t use, and to find alternate methods to use third-party services for automating or scheduling tasks, such as sharing your latest posts to different social media platforms.
There are a number of web servers, such as IFTTT, that help in automating such tasks and reduce the burden on your website and server resources.
Always go for Lightweight WordPress Themes:
WordPress themes come with a lot of dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, social icons and many more elements. Which are immensely appealing to the eye and will draw more users. If they have too many elements and higher page sizes, then they will cause your server to be slow and inefficient. The best option here is to use lightweight themes, like WordPress’ default themes. There are a number of minimalist themes that are great for a feature-rich website.
You can also opt for a theme that uses a good framework like Bootstrap or Foundation. The foundation framework builds themes, which are both lightweight and custom-made. These themes and frameworks will ensure that your site is appealing, and is efficient in its operations.
Minify Javascript and CSS files:
If you run your website through Google Page Speed Insights tool, you will be notified about minimizing the size of your CSS and Javascript files. The Page Speed Insight tool expresses that your website can run faster by reducing the number of CSS and Javascript calls, as well as the size of those files.
You can improve the site-loading speed by exploring the guides provided by Google and doing some manual fixing. If not, then there are plugins that will help you achieve this goal. The most popular is the Auto optimize tool that can help in optimizing CSS, Javascript and HTML of your WordPress site.
Enable GZIP Compression:
Compressing files on your local computer can save a lot of disk space. Similarly, for the web, you can use GZIP compression. This maneuver will dramatically reduce the bandwidth usage and the time it takes to gain access to your website.
GZIP compresses various files so that whenever a visitor tries to access your website. Their browser will first have to unzip the website. This process significantly reduces bandwidth usage because it uploads files as a compressed GZIP file. If you want to improve your site’s WordPress performance through this method. You can use either a plugin like the GZip Ninja Speed Optimization or insert a supporting code into your .htaccess file.
Disabling Trackbacks and Pingbacks:
Pingbacks and trackbacks are WordPress components that alert you whenever your site receives a link. It might sound useful, but you also have tools such as Google Webmaster Tools and other services to check the links of your website. This might result in an ineffective performance for your site. Keeping pingbacks and trackbacks on can also put an undesirable amount of strain on your server resources. This is so because whenever anyone tries to link up to your site, it generates requests from WordPress back and forth. To avoid this, you can turn off pingbacks and trackbacks in your settings tab.
Final Thought:
By following these tips, you will attain optimum function for your WordPress site. If you attempt these tweaks and do not see a change in performance. You may need to consider professional optimization services. These optimization services are available through service providers such as WPfixs. Who ensure regular and comprehensive maintenance, as well as quick address of any problems.
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