Increasing the speed of the website is a part of boosting the SEO of your website. So in this article today I will tell how you can optimize your website or blog created with WordPress and increase its speed to be much faster loading than before.
What is Website Speed?
Website speed is just a measurement of How fast your website content loads. The less time your website can load, the higher is the speed of your website. To know the speed of your website, you can take the help of website speed testing tools that are available for free on the internet.
Now according to Google’s new algorithm, the loading speed website plays a very important role in getting into rank in search results. Research has shown that a website whose loading speed is very high, its bounce rate is also very high.
If the loading speed or page speed of your website is very low, then you have a lot of chances to keep the bounce rate low, which is very beneficial for search engine optimization (SEO)
Here are some of the many ways to increase your WordPress website speed:
Choose a Fast and Trusted Hosting Provider
Loading or Website Speed is directly related to the performance of the host. So before taking any hosting, it is important to know where the hosting provider’s data center is and its response time.
For example, if my website is designed to target Indian visitors or traffic. So I would definitely like my website hosting to be hosted where it takes less time to reach Indian traffic or audiences. So that is why I would definitely like that if my website hosting data center is somewhere in India, it will be much better. The targeted traffic of my website means that the Indian audience will get very little time to reach my website and the loading speed will also be very low because the data center of my website is in India itself.
What I mean to say is that if you are taking any hosting for your website, then think carefully, where is your target audience and where is your hosting data center. The closer the target audience of your website and the data center of your hosting, the better it will be for your website.
If you are targeting Asian traffic, then choose any Asian data center, likewise, if you are targeting American, UK traffic, then choose USA or Uk data centers for your website hosting, So that the response time of your website would be very minimum for your targeted traffic /Audience /visitors.
Purchase a hosting provider that is giving you a good amount of convenience cheaply and also has a fast response time. Nowadays you can search on YouTube in your language, what to keep in mind before buying hosting from any posting provider. You will find many informative videos in your own language, related to this on YouTube.
Install a Lightweight Theme
lightweight Well -Optimized themes can increase website speed by reducing the loading time. You must have seen that the first time you install WordPress, the default theme(Twenty Nine, Twenty seven) is loaded very fast. Because there is no heavy coding done in that default theme. You will not see any extra JavaScript or extreme used CSS.
If you are installing any theme for your WordPress website then you must check how much is its loading speed. Before installing any theme on your WordPress website, you must check which theme will be right for your website in terms of loading speed.
You can install each theme one by one and check and compare which theme is taking less time to load.
Use a Cache plugin
The most advantageous thing about creating a website in WordPress is that you will get many plugins for free, which can greatly boost performance and website speed. You can use any cache plugin for your WordPress website so that it could load much faster.
I recommend you to install any free plugins like W3 total cache.
There are also a lot of premium plugins available in the market you can use them to get many extra premium features. If you are planning for a premium plugin to enhance your website performance I would definitely like you to have a look at the WP rocket plugin. According to me, this is the best WordPress premium casing plugin available in the market, you can visit the official website of this plugin you can check it out.
Optimize Image
Image optimization is essential; if the size of your images is very large on the landing page of your website, then it may take a longer time to load. When beginners set up a site, they don’t know how important it is to compress images.
For example, suppose you have 10 articles on the landing page on your website, and there are 10 thumbnails, or there are featured images, say each image is about 500KB. It means When a person opens your website, His browser requests your website’s Html+CSS+javaScript files + 10*500KB images to load. This means that your website will take a little longer to load fully. And this means that any visitors will have to wait a little longer, which is a very bad thing for search engine optimization.
Nowadays, many automatic image compression plug-ins are available for free. Using it, you can compress your uploaded images or photos and optimize them so that your website will load a little faster.
Minify CSS JavaScript
Compressing or Minifying CSS and JavaScript files are as essential as compressing images. You do not need to worry about that at all nowadays because there are a lot of plugins to install for free to Minify Unessery large codes. When you install any caching plugins they always give you an option to minify CSS on Javascript files so that your website could load faster.
Due to full of many features in premium themes the developers use a large amount of coding on these themes when you purchase a theme, it’s obvious that those themes are not well optimized initially when you install on your WordPress site. So when you are looking for any premium themes for your website make sure you are going to use an optimized theme with less coding and look clean.
You use Plugins to Minify CSS,javascript ,HTML . Free Plugins like Autoptimize, Fast Velocity Minify. etc all with mifying features. Use them and they will make the job done. If you are looking for a premium plugin do not hesitate to use Wp Rocket.
Enable Gzip Compression
This is a very easy and the most popular method to compress file sizes, by using it we can compress the files such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.After Enabling this any visitors who visit your website they will download the compressed files from your website instead of uncompressed large raw files. Hence Enabling Gzip compression can improve your website speed.
You can manually Enable Gzip compression or you can use a plugin for it. If you are using the Wp-Rocket Plugin You do not need to manually put code.
Use a CDN
A CDN or Content Delivery Network puts your website content closer to your visitors, which means faster load time, and happy visitors.
Here’s how it works.
Let’s say you run a popular blog, and you write a post about, say a puppy.
Your website is hosted in a data center. When your customers visit your blog from around the globe, they all connect back to that data center. While this way works fine, we can speed things up even more if we move the content closer to visitors.
With CDN, you get access to a global network of servers that host your content physically closer to your visitors. This means that when a visitor goes to your website and download that picture of Grumpy Cat, they’re actually downloading it from a CDN node that is close to them rather than connecting all the way back to the Server to get the photo. Faster Puppy means happier customers.
So, the moral of the story is if you can afford a CDN go for it, It can make your website Blazing fast.
Also, read Tips for blogger(beginners)