Have you ever visited a website that was painfully slow? It can be a really huge turn off. Many websites take a while to load and this can be discouraging. Apart from the site losing half of it’s visitors, search engines ranking will also be affected. If you are running an E-commerce site, then you are likely to have low sales too!.
Just what can you do to make your WordPress site load very fast and be optimized? This article will suggest 5 tested and proven methods.
First, check your site’s speed.Keep in mind that this speed may differ from page to page, as it depends on various factors like cache, content type, size, etc. The homepage is our main focus as it is the benchmark to test a site’s load time.
You can check the speed by using any website analysis tool online. After knowing the site’s speed, try to implement the following.
- Reduce image sizes
Yes, reduce image sizes. They are are a major factor that affects a site’s speed. Rather than simply uploading images with huge size running into megabytes, use a simple tool to reduce the image size without compromising it’s quality. You can either manually do this before uploading the images, or with the aid of a WordPress plugin after uploading the images. Plugins like WP Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer are good examples.
- Deactivate or uninstall plugins
Whether you know it or not, plugins also affects the load time of a site. Some people have up to 20 plugins on their site with many not even being used or necessary. Unwanted plugins adds a lot of junk to web files. It also increases the size of your backup. If your site is slow, deactivate and uninstall any unnecessary plugins.
- Use a lightweight WordPress theme / framework
You do love a fancy elegant theme, yes? We all do. Sadly, sometimes these themes are harmful. If they have too many elements and higher page sizes, they will put a strain on your web server. Where possible, use WordPress default themes or use a lightweight theme that is built on a good framework.
- Minify CSS and JS Files
If you have analyzed your site using any website analysis tool, you will notice that one of the suggestions to speed up the site is to minify CSS and JS files. This actually requires the assistance of a web developer. So you may choose to talk to one and seek help. If you want to cut cost however, you may use a plugin to achieve this. Autoptimize is a very good plugin that can be used.
- Use a cache plugin
This is one common and easy way to speed up a website. One very popular plugin that is used for this purpose is W3 Total Cache. It helps in making the complex tasks of adding caching rules to your website elements simple.
Other tricks includes;
Changing to a better host provider.
Cleanup of database.
Disabling ping-backs and track-backs.
All this methods are easy to apply and will help to speed up site. Go ahead and give it a shot, after which you can analyze your site again and see the great improvements.
