Website speed affects conversion rate, User Experience, Bounce rate, and many more things. Many businesses complain about web page loads slowly due to issue on their WordPress Websites.
Consider Kissmatrick’s detailed research on page load time and its effects. The report says 47% of users expect a website load in 2 seconds. 1-second delay on loading website would cost you 7% reduction in the conversation!
There are few easy techniques to speed up your WordPress website.
A search engine like Google and Bing gives ranking factor boots to the website which loads faster. So what do you need to do the make your website load faster?
Here is the list of the things that you can do to speed up your website.
Image Optimization
Often large image size causes a web page to load slowly. WordPress has a great plugin called WP- SmushIt which will do the image optimization automatically, as you upload an image in WordPress Page or Post.
Minify Resources
When it is possible Javascript (JS), CSS and HTML resource file should be minified. What minify does is it removes the blank spaces and new lines from the files. It saves few bytes and kb in files. It makes resources load faster. All different CSS files should be merged into single CSS file that would save many HTTP requests and help you load web page faster. Online free tools like Willpeavy Can be used to minify these resources. WordPress plugins like Better WordPress Minify or WP super Minify can be used to minify the resources.
Use a Caching Plugin
WordPress caching plugins are very useful. Using a caching plugin can drastically improve page load time and most of the on WordPress are free & easy to use. You can use popular W3 Total Cache, it has all the features you need for caching and it is quick & easy to install.
Clean and Optimized Database
Your WordPress database might slow down the website. We need to clean up multiple post revisions, duplicate content, spam comments etc. from the database. The database often needs clean up at regular interval due make sure it is optimized and clean. WordPress Plugin WP Sweep offers database optimization to keep your website optimized.
Plugin Organizer
WordPress has so many plugins awesome plugins. Sometimes it is overwhelming to download many plugins. Unnecessary plugins add page loading time and slow to the website. WordPress has a plugin called Plugin Organizer to manage plugins for you.
Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The people visits your website from different location across the globe and site-loading speed varies from the location far away from the hosted server. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) help in keeping site loading speed to a minimum for a visitor from various countries. A CDN network keeps a copy of the website in various datacenters located in different places. The primary function of a CDN is to serve the web page to a visitor from the nearest server. MaxCDN and CloudFlare CDN are popular CDN services.
Turn off Pingbacks and Trackbacks
WordPress monitors and interacts with other blogs that are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks. Every time another website mention about your post or article it notifies your website, which updates data on the post. By turning off this pingback will help you save lots of HTTP requests and hence the page will load more faster.
GZIP Compression
Compressing a file on your local machine can save you lot of space. Similarly, on the web, GZIP compression is used. This will dramatically reduce the bandwidth usage and time taken to access your web page will also reduce. GZIP compresses multiple files so that whenever a server receives a request to access a web page browser will first unzip the website. This process brings down bandwidth considerably.
Author Bio:
Gaurav Kanabar is the Director of Alphanso Tech, a globally acknowledged IT consulting company providing the services in the arena of the WordPress Web Development. With the immense support from the adroit team, Alphanso Tech has been serving a huge client base worldwide.
