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How to Improve Your WordPress Website Speed (5 Steps to Improve Your Site Speed)

Sep 6, 2023

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A slow website loading time could harm your business. Social media and 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 is taking too lengthy to load, potential customers may simply click away.

Fortunately, there are some excellent strategies that you can employ to increase the speed of your WordPress site speed. Utilizing plugins, and following the best practices can improve the speed of your site and also keep your visitors to your site.

In this guide, we'll look at five methods to increase the speed of your WordPress speed. In addition, we'll discuss how slowing down your website can be and the reasons why speedy load times are essential. Let's begin!

What slows down your WordPress Website's Speed (And Why Speed is Important)

Time to load a website refers to how long it takes 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 website are:

  • Pictures
  • Videos
  • Slow plugins
  • Lack of caching
  • External scripts

This penalizes slow sites and makes them appear lower on the list of search results, making it harder for customers to find your business.

You can use a free software such as IsItWP speed test. IsItWP Speed Test to assess your WordPress site's performance.

After you've established your base line, it is time to start making changes to speed up the loading time. Additionally, you can use this tool to run tests during the update process, to see which methods will be most efficient for your site.

How to Increase Your WordPress Speed of Your Website (5 Simple Ways)

Once you've realized the significance of the WordPress website's speed is, we'll take a look some easy ways you can decrease the time it takes for your website to load.

1. Choose your theme and plugins carefully

Themes and plugins are key components of WordPress websites. However, poorly-designed themes or plugins can slow down your site significantly.

If you are choosing a plugin or theme for your site, it is important to:

  • Review user reviews and comments. This can give you a good idea for how well the plugin or theme is performing for different users.
  • Find out whether your theme or plugin have recently been updated. Tools that receive regular updates from their developers are more stable and likely to have better optimization.
  • It is possible to test the performance of the staging site before as well as after incorporating the new tool, to see if there are any significant reductions.

2. Optimize Your Images

For reducing your media files' impact it is recommended to use an image optimizer similar to the ShortPixel software:

This plugin integrates into the WordPress website. It allows you to improve the images from all types of files that include PNG as well as JPEG. It's very easy to use, and you can compress all images on your website in a single click.

You can utilize the ShortPixel plugin to improve images through Media > Bulk ShortPixel > Begin Optimizing:

This bulk optimization tool can reduce all images within your WordPress library at once.

It is also possible to make use of "lazy loading". This setting prevents your site from displaying images until the user is scrolling down until they reach the desired images. This can speed the loading process.

It is possible to enable lazy loading with a plugin like Smush:

After installing the plugin, all you have to do is to go through Smush > Lazy Load > activate:

When you enable lazy loading, you can modify various settings such as the types of media, exclusions and the script's placement. Smush can also be a great choice to compress and shrink images even if you do not use ShortPixel.

3. Use a Caching Plugin (or a Host with Built-In Caching)

Caching is an essential process that helps your website load faster. It creates and stores the site's content in a storage area known as a cache. It's so that your entire website doesn't have to load every time a new visitor. It can access these saved site details for new users, so it takes much less time to load.

One of the most efficient methods of caching your site is using a plugin like WP Super Cache. It makes use of a range of techniques, such as simple static files designed for common users, and "super-cached" static documents that are designed for experienced users.

The WP Super Cache to store your site's data via Settings > WP Super Cache > Caching on:

On this dashboard, you are able to modify your cache settings, by going to the Advancedtab. In this tab, you have the option of choosing which users are able to access cached content, as well as how the caches will last and if you wish to make sure that your caches are delivered by an expert.

This host's built-in caching is one of the most efficient offered, making it literally the fastest WordPress hosting service available.

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

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a group of servers located around all over the globe. Each one stores a cache of data for your site whenever a person comes to your website they'll receive content from the CDN nearest to their location. So your website will load a lot more quickly because there is less geographical distance.

There are a variety of CDN alternatives available, including Cloudflare. Sign up to the paid subscription and then begin with this high-end CDN to get your website to your visitors quicker.

5. Utilize Excerpts

If you have a blog, then you probably want to showcase the blog's content. However, displaying the blog's entire content can slow down your website's speed. You can instead think about displaying snippets of your blog posts on the page's landing pages.

For example, you can see on the blog homepage that it does not display blog posts in their entirety. It shows just a few sentences from each one, and enables the user to simply click the title to read the rest:

In accordance with your theme it is possible to alter your settings so that excerpts are displayed through settings > reading > For every blog post that you want to include a summary:

Then, you can modify the excerpts from the new posts by clicking Posts > Add New. Within this page it is possible to click Exerpt > Post:

There, you can write a custom excerpt that can be displayed instead of the complete post. You can also include excerpts in your existing posts.

Conclusion

A slow-loading website could ruin your business. If visitors leave your site, you could miss out on opportunities for conversions. Therefore, optimizing your WordPress site's speed is one of the most important aspects you can accomplish.

For a quick recap, here are some ways that to improve your WordPress performance:

  1. Reducing the size of your image files through the ShortPixel software Consider lazy loading.
  2. Use the Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare to reduce loading time.
  3. Utilize post excerpts to reduce loading times.

Have you got any concerns about how to improve your WordPress speed? Tell us about it in the section of comments below!

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