As of today, WordPress is being used by 39% of the website. Without any doubt WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System). WordPress is mostly used for blogging, although by installing it on our own hosting account we can create any kind of website. The modern scale of WordPress enables to create a website from blogging, eCommerce to the affiliate. The popularity of WordPress continues to grow.
In the recent past couple of years search engines’ is focussing on website speed for the rank, so it’s the responsibility for the website owner to keep that in mind so that makes the website features doesn’t cost the slow website. That’s why optimization is a very important aspect to run a website.
How can you speed up your WordPress website? Before going any further let’s check the current state of the website. To check the current state of the website we can get a bunch of tools by searching it on the search engine. On the below list I have mentioned some of the most useful tools from my experience. These tools will help to get the info like how much time is taking to fully load our website, which file is taking how much time and much more:
Google Page Speed
GTmetrix
Web Page Test
Pingdom
Now, let’s discuss how can you speed or increase your WordPress website speed. To make the discussion easy, take a look at this table of content first:
Choose the Best Hosting
Choose the Perfect Theme
Optimize Your Images
Use Perfect and Fewest Plugin
Use Caching Plugin and CDN
Optimize Your Database
Keeping Update the Theme, Plugin, and WordPress Version
Choose the Best Hosting: To scale up your WordPress website choose the best Hosting service provider. The first reason for the slowing down of your website is to choose an unorganized and noisy hosting service package. So, choosing the best hosting chose all the aspects of a good hosting service provider.
Choose the Perfect Theme: To choose the best/perfect theme for achieving our requirements is very important. A good design can highly influence visitors. That’s why theme developers are highly focused on aesthetics over speed. Which can make the theme hard to load fast. So, while choosing the theme keep the speed in mind with the style and User experience.
Right now, one of the most popular themes is Astra. Which you can serve you any purpose. Before taking any decision it’s highly recommended to check all the reviews and feedback and analyze their own needs. Where it’s the free theme of the paid theme.
Optimize Your Images: Optimize your website’s images. WordPress’s core media management, more specifically its image management system can slow the whole website if you use the large images. Tha’s why to try to upload the images in which quality is good size is mature enough comparatively. Optimizing the images can be done in two ways. Way one, Using the plugins like WP Smush it, which will allow you to optimize your image while uploading it. The second way is the manual procedure, you can use some online tools to make the image optimize before uploading it on your website.
Use Perfect and Fewest Plugin: The importance of using the plugin is very high, that doesn’t mean it’s good practice to use an enormous number of the plugin. Before choosing the plugin is good practice to check the pros and cons of the plugin and check the user feedback first. And it’s a good price that, if the purpose can solve the core then make your own custom help plugin.
Use Caching Plugin and CDN: Basically, the caching helps a website to load without calling from the host. There is some good plugin that is offering such caching services which can be used to speed up the loading time of the website. From the following list you can check some of the best caching plugins:
W3 Total Cache
WP Super Cache
CDN ( Content Delivery Network ) by using the CDN we can deliver the content ( text, images, HTML ) to the user/visitor very efficiently. Basically, CDN will help to reduce the pressure on the Main Hosting. To make that produce two of the very well reputed CDN is, Cloudflare and Incapsula.
Optimize Your Database: WordPress default system is every time we update, edit the post it will be saved as a revision on our database. The advantage is if we make a mistake so that we can recover it from the revision copy. The disadvantage is as it’s taking so much data for the query it’s taking more time then it should or usually do. Within can cause a slow website. Tha’s why plugin line WP-Optimize, WP DBManager can keep us safe from such unnecessary data killing. Noteworthy that you can also use the Revision Control plugin.
Version control: Keep your theme, plugin, and WordPress version up to date. To run your website the plugin, theme, or WordPress you are using, make sure those are up to date. Sometimes the older version can lead to a slowing website. That’s why it’s highly recommended to use the latest version. Using the latest version also helps us to keep our website safe from the hacking. Note that, to make updates make sure you have to take a full backup your website. Other than that, by reducing the unnecessary content from the website, checking the performance of the plugin themes we can speed up our website.
Hopefully the above points will help to make a good change of our website scale up. If you find the blog useful or have any thoughts on what can be added on the list please feel free to let me know of the comment section.