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What You Can Do to Improve Your WordPress Page Speed (5 Steps to Improve Your Site Speed)

Sep 6, 2023

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A slow website loading time can sabotage your business. A continuous stream of content have reduced the human attention span which means that users are bored faster than they have ever.

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If your website takes too time to load, prospective customers could simply go to your competitor's site and click away.

Fortunately, there are some effective strategies to increase your WordPress website's performance. Utilizing plugins and adhering to guidelines can help increase the speed at which your website loads and keep the ever-changing visitors visiting your website.

In this article we'll examine five strategies to improve your WordPress website's speed. We'll also explore what slows down your site and the reasons why speedy loading times are so critical. Let's begin!

What slows down your WordPress website's speed? (And Why Speed is Important)

Website load time is the time that it takes for your website to display all content fully. The content could include pictures or videos as well as text-based elements.

The factors that are most likely to slow your site down include:

  • Images
  • Videos
  • Slow plugins
  • Inadequate caching
  • External scripts

This penalizes slow sites and puts them on the bottom of the search results list, making it harder for your customers to find your company.

You can use a free instrument like that of the IsItWP speed tests to test the speed of your WordPress website's performance:

Once you know your baseline, you can begin making tweaks to improve the loading speed. You can also utilize this tool to perform tests throughout the process of updating and determine what methods work best for your website.

How to Increase Your WordPress Speed of Your Website (5 Steps to Take)

Now that you know how important your WordPress website's speed is important, let's take a look at some easy ways you can decrease the time it takes for your website to load.

1. Select your theme and plugins carefully

Themes and plugins play an important role as parts of WordPress websites. But, poorly-designed themes or plugins can make your site slow.

In selecting a new plugin or theme for your site, it is important to:

  • Check out user ratings and comments. This can give you a good idea for how the plugin and theme will perform for users.
  • Check if the theme or plugin has been updated recently. Tools that receive regular updates from the developers are more reliable and more likely to be optimized.
  • It is possible to test the performance of the staging site before and after adding the new tool to determine the extent of any drops.

2. Improve Your Images

In order to reduce the impact of the effect of your media files You can think about using an image optimization tool like ShortPixel. ShortPixel software:

This plugin can be integrated with the WordPress website. It enables you to optimize pictures of all file types, including PNG and JPEG. It's extremely user-friendly and allows you to compress all images on your website with a single click.

It is possible to make use of this ShortPixel plugin to optimize images through Media > Bulk ShortPixel > Start Optimizing:

This bulk optimization tool can compress all the images in your WordPress library at once.

You may also want to consider using "lazy loading". This setting prevents your site from showing pictures until a user scrolls down and reaches the images. This speeds up loading times for the first time.

You can allow lazy loading with the help of a plugin such as Smush:

After installing the plugin, all you need to do is to go towards the Smush menu > lazy load and then activate:

Once you activate lazy loading, you can alter the settings to suit your needs, such as the types of media, exclusions and even script positions. Smush is also a good option to compress and resize images, even without using ShortPixel.

3. Utilize a Caching plugin (or a Host with Built-In Caching)

Caching is a vital process that helps your website load quickly. It creates and stores duplicates of your website within a place called a cache, so the site doesn't need to reload with every new user. It can access these stored site information for new visitors, which means it takes much less time to load.

One of the simplest methods to cache your website is using an application like the WP Super Cache. It uses a few different techniques, such as simple static files for general users and "super-cached" static files that are designed for experts:

The WP Super Cache to store your site's information through settings > Super Cache > Caching on:

In this dashboard, you are able to modify the settings of your cache by going into the Advancedtab. You can select the users who are able to access cached content, as well as how the caches will last and whether you want to make sure that your caches are delivered by an expert.

Its integrated caching is one of the most efficient offered, making it by far the fastest WordPress hosting service available.

4. Make use of the Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a group of servers located around the world. Each one stores a cache of the data on your website whenever a person visits your page, they will receive the information from the CDN which is the closest one to their location. Your website is therefore able to load a lot more quickly because there is less geographical distance.

There are a variety of CDN alternatives available, including Cloudflare. It is possible to sign up for an account that is paid and begin making use of this top CDN for your website to bring it more quickly to users.

5. Make use of Excerpts

If your site has blogs, you'll probably want to showcase your content. However, displaying the blog posts in their entirety will slow down your website's speed. You can instead look into displaying excerpts from your content on the landing pages.

You can observe on the blog's home page that it does not show the entire blog posts. The page displays a couple of paragraphs from each, and lets the user simply click the title for the full text:

In accordance with your theme you may need to change the settings of your browser to show excerpts through the Settings menu > Reading For each blog post, include > Summary:

Then, you can easily customize the excerpts of the new posts by clicking the Posts tab and clicking Add New. Within this page it is possible to click Post > Excerpt:

There, you can compose a custom-written excerpt which is displayed in lieu of your complete blog. It is also possible to add excerpts to already published posts.

Conclusion

Slow loading websites can ruin your business. If customers leave the site, you could miss out on opportunities for conversions. Thus, enhancing your WordPress website's speed is among of the most important actions you can take.

In summary, these are a few ways to improve the quality of your WordPress performance:

  1. Reduce your image file sizes through the ShortPixel plug-in, and consider lazy loading.
  2. Utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare to cut down on loading time.
  3. Utilize post excerpts to reduce loading times.

Do you have any questions about how to improve your WordPress site's performance? Tell us about it in the comment section below!

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