Nowadays, WordPress stands out as the most used CMS system in the world. There are millions of websites that use it. Because of the popularity of the platform, thousands of themes and plugins were created to help enhance the websites. While that is great, it can easily lead towards many problems as site owners try to do all that they can in order to enhance appearance. That can easily lead towards a decrease in site speed.
The Importance Of Site Speed
As an individual lands on your site, there are just some seconds to gain attention. It was highlighted that even a 2 seconds delay can lead towards a 4% reduction in click rate and lost revenue. To put it as simple as possible, people just go away if they have to wait what they perceive as being too long for a page to load.
Google highlighted that mobile friendly websites were favoured. This basically means that site loading speed is included in the search engine giant ranking algorithm. Your SEO will be affected. When using WordPress, it is vital that the themes used are responsive as when site loading speed is low, ranking is lost.
Basically, when the site loads slowly, you lose money and your visitors are not going to like slow loading speeds. This is why you should know how to speed up your WordPress site. You will quickly see that the solutions are so much easier than what many think.
Choose A Suitable Web Host
Most web hosts are not that great. They are actually really bad since they add so many sites on just one server. This leads towards really slow site loading speed and down time that appears much more often than it should.
Try to avoid shared hosting packages. We will not mention a particular host that you should choose since this is highly subjective. However, what counts the most is choosing a hosting package that is tailored for WordPress and that never adds too many sites on just one server.
Using Caching Plugins
The WordPress caching plugins appeared due to a need to speed up site loading times. They are particularly helpful. To make matters even better, they are completely free. The one that is the most recommended is the highly popular W3 Total Cache. It includes all features that would be needed and will increase site loading speed in a drastic way. Even if you do not know much about the CMS system, you can always use this plugin. Activate it and watch your loading speeds go down.
Using CDN (Content Delivery Network)
In the past, the use of CDN systems was only available for the big companies as the services were expensive. This is no longer the case. Nowadays, most sites can benefit from the use of CDN with faster loading speed being the main advantage.
To explain it in a simple way, the content delivery networks are going to take static files present on the website (Javascript codes, images, CSS and so on) and copy them on servers located in various parts of the world. Based on where the visitor is from, the files will be offered from the closest server. This guarantees that loading speed is as slow as it can be since downloads would happen much faster.
Automatically Optimizing Images
One of the reasons why a WordPress site loads too slowly is the use of images that are not at all optimized. They are simply too large or the resolution is not one that is proper for the internet. You can normally see that on image heavy websites like those in the food industry.
When you optimize images for the internet and you use appropriate sizes, huge increases in speed can appear with every single blog page. Various automatic WordPress plugins exist and can be installed in seconds.
Optimizing WordPress Databases
As WordPress sites grow and hundreds of posts appear, the databases become larger and larger. All professionals agree that it is a necessity to optimize the databases but the manual process is one that is very boring and tedious. A solution came from the use of plugins like those presented here. Most work in similar ways. You install them and then you run the automated optimization process. It will optimize the entire database, including tables, drafts, post revisions, spam messages and more. Overhead is automatically reduced and the site will load a lot faster.
Using LazyLoad
This is something that many WordPress users know nothing about. We can define LazyLoad as being a process in which only above the fold images would load as the site is opened by a visitor. After that, as the reader would scroll down, other images would start to load.
The great thing about LazyLoad is that it speeds up page loads and saves bandwidth as less would be consumed. If the visitor does not scroll all the way down, only part of the page will be downloaded on the computer of the user.
Conclusions
All the seven solutions mentioned above can work for any WordPress installation and if you use them all, the loading speed of the site will end up being so much lower than you would believe. Combine that with suitable responsive web design and it is a guarantee your search engine ranking positioning would not be affected by loading speeds that are too high.
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