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What You Can Do to Improve Your WordPress Page Speed (5 Easy Ways)

Sep 6, 2023

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Slow site loading times can sabotage your business. The constantly flooded with information has reduced the human attention span, meaning users lose interest faster than they have ever.

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If your website takes too lengthy to load, potential customers may simply move on to another site.

It is good to know that there are effective strategies to increase your WordPress website's performance. Utilizing plugins, and following the best practices can increase the speed at which your website loads and help keep your visitors on your page.

In this post we'll examine five strategies to improve your WordPress website's speed. Also, we'll look at how slowing down your website can be, and why fast loading times are so critical. Let's begin!

What is the cause of slowing down your WordPress website's speed? (And Why Speed is Important)

Website load time is the time that it takes your site to display all content fully. This content can include images or videos as well as text-based elements.

Some of the elements that could slow your website are:

  • Images
  • Videos
  • Slow plug-ins
  • Inadequate caching
  • External scripts

It penalizes slow websites and makes them appear lower on the list of search results which makes it more difficult for potential customers to locate your company.

There is a cost-free instrument like the IsItWP Speed Test to check your WordPress site's performance.

After you've established your baseline, you can start making changes to speed up the loading time. You can also utilize this tool to perform tests as part of the updating process, to see which methods work best for your site.

What can you do to improve your WordPress website's speed (5 Easy Ways)

Once you've realized how important the WordPress site's speed is, let's take a look at some easy ways you can reduce your site's loading time.

1. Choose your theme and plugins carefully

Themes and plugins are the primary parts of WordPress websites. Themes and plugins are essential components of WordPress. But, poorly-designed themes and plugins could make your site slow.

In selecting a new theme or plugin for your website, you'll want to

  • Check out user ratings as well as reviews. This can give an idea of how the plugin or theme will perform for users.
  • Find out whether the plugin or theme has been recently updated. Tools that receive regular updates from the developers will be more reliable and are more likely to be optimized.
  • You can test the website's performance prior to and after adding the new instrument, and see whether there is any noticeable drops.

2. Make Your Images

In order to reduce the impact of your media files' impact, you can consider using an image optimizer similar to ShortPixel. ShortPixel plugin:

This plugin can be integrated with the WordPress site. It lets you optimize pictures of all file types, including PNG and JPEG. It's very easy to use, and you can compress all photos on your site with a single click.

It is possible to use ShortPixel as a ShortPixel plugin to improve images by going to Media > Bulk ShortPixel > Begin Optimizing:

This bulk optimization tool can compress all the images in your WordPress library at once.

There is another option to use "lazy loading". This setting prevents your site from showing images until the user has scrolled down to reach the images. This speeds up loading times for the first time.

You can enable lazy loading with the help of a plugin such as Smush:

After you've installed the plugin all you need do is go towards the Smush menu > lazy load > Activate:

When you enable lazy loading, you are able to customize various settings, including the types of media, exclusions and the script's placement. Smush can also be a great option to compress and resize images even if you do not use ShortPixel.

3. Utilize a Caching plugin (or a Host with Built-In Caching)

Caching is a vital process to help your website load quickly. It makes and saves duplicates of your website in a storage area known as a cache, so the entire website doesn't have to reload with every new visitor. It can access these information from the cache for any new users, so it's much quicker to load.

One of the most efficient ways to cache your site is using the plugin WP Super Cache. It makes use of a range of methods, including basic static files that are suitable for all users and "super-cached" static file that are designed for experienced users.

The the WP Super Cache to cache your website data through settings > Super Cache > Caching on:

On this dashboard, you can also adjust your cache settings, by going through the Advancedtab. You can select which users receive cached content, how long the caches are able to last, as well as whether or not you would like to allow expert delivery of caches.

The internal caching feature is the best available, which makes it by far the fastest WordPress web host available.

4. Utilize the Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of servers scattered across all over the globe. Each of them stores a cache of the data on your website, and when a user goes to your site it will be served the content from the CDN which is the closest one to their location. Thus, your site will run faster since there's less geographical distance.

There are a variety of CDN choices available, such as Cloudflare. Sign up to the paid subscription and then begin using this premium CDN for your website to bring it more quickly to users.

5. Use Excerpts

If your website has a blog, then you most likely wish to show off your blog posts. The problem is that displaying blog's entire content will slow down your website's speed. Instead, think about displaying snippets of the content on your website's landing pages.

For example, you can notice on the blog's home page that it does not show the entire blog posts. The page displays a couple of phrases from each and lets the user select the headline to read the rest:

Based on the theme you're using, you might need to modify the settings of your browser to show excerpts through Settings > Reading > for each blog post Include > Summary:

Then, you can quickly alter the excerpts in the new posts by clicking posts > add new. Within this page it is possible to click Exerpt > Post:

You can also create a customized excerpt that can be displayed instead of the whole post. You can also add excerpts to already published posts.

Conclusion

A slow-loading website could ruin your business. If visitors leave your site, you could miss the opportunity to convert them. Thus, enhancing your WordPress site's speed is one of the most vital things you can do.

In summary, these are a few ways you can boost the quality of your WordPress performance:

  1. Reduce your image file sizes through the ShortPixel plugin Also, think about lazy loading.
  2. Use the Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare to speed up loading times.
  3. Utilize post excerpts to speed up loading time.

Do you have any questions concerning how you can speed up your WordPress site's performance? Let us know in the comment section below!

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