WordPress is one of the most common blogging and website-hosting platforms across the globe now. Millions of users are making use of this channel to post and read content. However, speed can sometimes be its undoing. When the speed is not optimized, you might be dealing with a very clumsy site.
In fact, stats suggest that when a page load is delayed by 2 seconds, user satisfaction drops by 3.8%. This could prove to be quite the challenge, especially if you are engaging in e-commerce through WordPress.
Before launching in online world, first install SSL Certificate in your WordPress blog/website. SSL secure your visitors credit card details, login ID and password from hackers. It enables encrypted communication between a web server and a web browser.
Thus, here are some of the most effective ideas to speed up your WordPress page. Each of these simple ideas could help you work with a faster and more efficient webpage.
One of the most important considerations for speeding up your WordPress page is choosing the right hosting. This is where most of us go wrong in our selection. Ideally, for beginners, the best option would be to opt for a shared host. But this could prove to be quite the trouble! A shared host is rather slow and has the chance of malfunctioning when even a big feature is implemented on the site.
In addition, a good hosting also comes back with good customer care support. Thus, it is imperative to a fast host that can perform well even in the backend and improves the overall performance of the page.
This is more like a trick to speeding up your WordPress site. Integrating CloudFare in your page could do you a world of good! This is a very effective solution in boosting the speed of your page. Teamed with W3 Total Cache, this works towards improving your security measures along with the speed.
Next comes the framework of the page. This is another important aspect to consider while trying to find answers of how to increase speed of WordPress site. There are a lot of frameworks where too many plugins and features slow down the site and reduce the overall speed of the page. This could prove to be quite the problem. Rather, the best option here is to select a framework that is easy to load, is not burdened by unnecessary features, plugins, and the likes. For instance, the Thesis Theme Framework could be a good choice here. This makes all the changes from the theme end and keeps the framework light.
This is a rather innovative solution, but yes, replacing your PHP by the more-convenient HTML could prove to be useful here. This little change can actually bring down the site load speeds by a huge margin. A good way to start from here would be cutting down on the useless PHP executions. Most of the themes are usually clogged with a lot of PHP bloat. When the same codes are replaced by static HTML, the CPU processing time is significantly reduced, thereby increasing site performance and speed.
Another interesting method to increase the speeds of the WordPress pages is by bringing in a caching plugin into your site. Most of the WordPress plugins prove to be quite useful for the site performance, but the caching ones are the best in this regard. Also, since most of these plugins are freely available on WordPress, it is wise to integrate them into the webpage. How do these cached plugins actually help? The idea is to cache the elements such that the page loads faster. All you have to do is install the plugins and you are good to go!
WordPress, by its set of default settings, has the tendency to interact with other sites with the help of pingbacks and trackbacks. This puts in some additional pressure on the webpage. This is because whenever your blog on WordPress is mentioned by another on the internet, you are notified of this and this adds some data to your page on the whole. This keeps adding to the stress. So, it would be a good idea to turn the pingbacks and trackbacks off in order to run the blog faster.
A lot of websites are gradually embracing content delivery networks for producing and delivering smart and efficient content. This makes it convenient since the visitors can download all the static files very quickly. This includes the pictures, CSS and JavaScript. There are quite a few content delivery networks made available on the WordPress platform. In fact, the blogging platform also helps you with suitable free plugins that you could put to use as well.
WordPress has an inherent tendency to keep draft versions of its posts stored. For instance, when a blogger is writing a post down, they will keep making continuous edits and this will lead to multiple versions of the post being stored. This works fine in order to track the changes but proves to be quite a menace when the post is published. They would not need the versions thereafter. But these draft versions end up occupying a lot of space in the framework, thereby slowing the site down. Thus, it would be a good idea to control these versions manually. Besides, there are some plugins available that could do the job for you, to remove unnecessary clutter from the backend.
This is a rather basic concept for maintaining high speeds for the WordPress page. Optimizing the homepage of the blog could go a long way in boosting the site’s performance. Now, there is no single formula that can be applied to this. Instead, there are a lot of small things that can be done in order to achieve this. For instance, the homepage should feature small excerpts instead of the posts instead of whole articles. Also, too many posts on the first page adds to the clutter. Besides, if you include a lot of widgets, they tend to slow down the loading process. Similarly, there are a number of these small ideas that could help you clean up the homepage.
LazyLoad proves to be a very effective solution when it comes to finding answers of how to optimize WordPress website speed. Images do take up a lot of space on the site. This includes both storage space, leading to decreased performances, and data consumption. Using LazyLoad would help you cut down on the space and data. The images and graphics would be made available to the user only when they are absolutely needed and when the user scrolls down to them. Otherwise, the page is kept free from image and other clutter.
Cleaning the WordPress database helps optimize it and thus make it better suited for faster and better performances. Even though this is a very simple and obvious content, we often tend to ignore it. This would include removing unnecessary draft posts, images, tables, and the likes. While this could be done manually, making use of a few plugins could perfectly optimize the database.
Every site comes with a Gravatar image for the user. Most bloggers prefer to keep these images in order to make the page more personalized. But the truth is, these Gravatar images could be responsible for slowing down the blog pages. Disabling these images could do the trick for you. This means, instead of keeping a default image, you are basically leaving the space blank. This, in turn, takes up less space on your page and thus helps increase the speed of the blog.
A lot of bloggers and website managers are aware of the concept of hotlinking. This is more like cyber theft that other online bloggers tend to make use of. What they do is link the images of your site on to their pages such that the bandwidth load on your site increases. This leads to your page gradually slowing down for its own articles and content. At this point of time, it would be a rather good idea to disable hotlinking on your website such that other pages cannot scrape through your content and media files for their own use. For this, a simple code in your root .htaccess file could do the job for you.
Lastly, this method helps the users clean out content based on specific dates. How does this work? An expires header basically features the date or time beyond which no responses are to be noted for that post. This marks the expiry of that particular content or resource and is thus not available for the users anymore. In effect, when you use an expires header in your posts, you are basically putting a time stamp on the article such that beyond a certain date or time, this post would become unavailable. And they would not be able to have access to this static content. This proves to be quite useful when the load time of the pages is significantly reduced.
Simply follow these steps and get answers to how to optimize speed of WordPress website. If you have any query, let us know in the comments below.
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