For business enterprises whether small or big, WordPress is ranked among the top Content Management Systems (CMS) tools. It’s free, fast to set up, simple to manage, and there are a wide array of developers and extensions to aid with all your website requirements.
As sites become old, the one downside is the sluggish performance of the WordPress website on the frontend and backend. It’s no surprise that sluggish websites annoy users and grow bounce rates. Google consider speed as a ranking factor, thus WordPress Web Speed Optimization focus on building faster sites for higher ranking preference on search results.
Tips to Optimize WordPress Website Speed
1. Test with Tools
Before doing any performance updates, it is suggested to perform page speed test on important pages to understand how the website is currently working. Most popular tools to consider are Pingdom and GooglePageSpeed Insights. After each step, perform a new speed test to check if there is any incremental improvement done from the optimizations.
2. Change Website Host
One of the major culprits of slow website performance is hosting. Experts recommends selecting a host that’s particularly geared toward hosting WordPress websites. We suggest WordPress Web Development having reliable hosting service to clients because of its speed, reliability and customer service. This leads to improvement in speed of up to 30% or more just by switching to a reliable web host. The improvements in engagement and rankings surge the overall cost to upgrade hosting plan.
3.Decrease Page Size
One major factor impacting speed is page size. The larger the page, the longer it will take to load on a user’s device. Typically the heaviness on a webpage is due to media files including images and videos. You can use the page speed tools to identify large resources. If you have large images, you can compress them in a photo editing tool like Photoshop. There are several options in themes to enable lazy-loading of images and content, which load the content or image when needed.
4. Audit Plugins
The next thing we suggest is to take thorough inventory of all the extensions working on your WordPress installation. Do you have plugins not enabled on your website? Delete! Do you have plugins that are enabled but are of no use? Disable and delete! While plugins are a life saver and save both development time and money, they ultimately bloat a website. So be alert with the use of plugins and always keep an eye on what’s in use and what’s not.
5.Implement CDN
If you own a website that is accessed across the nation, or on global front, enabling CDN will speed up the time it takes a website to load for a user. This is possible with a version of the website on a server that is closest to the user. Some hosting plans offer this feature or you have to enable, and some might offer an additional cost. If your website is media heavy, and you cater to global customers, then a CDN is worth investment.
Hopefully you will observe prominent improvements in website speed after going through these optimization steps. If not, it may be time for a new website, in which case, hire WordPress Developer from a reputed agency for pixel-perfect web design.
Wrapping Up:
Being a popular CMS, WordPress offers remarkable solution important for setting up an online selling store. It has high-level security, thousands of plugins, well-designed themes, API, and much more. But with time website becomes slow in performance and to meet competition it becomes crucial to optimize performance. The steps mentioned are important for website speed optimization.
