As a website owner, you may know that page loading speed can have a great impact on the overall success of your site. A fast loading page will bring better user experience, leading to a significant increase in page views, and help with your WordPress SEO. But did you know if your site is fast enough, and what you should do to boost your WordPress speed and performance? Let’s take a tour of this with us!
1. Check Your WordPress Website Speed
When you pay many visits to your own website, your browser will store the site in cache and automatically collect it just as you start typing an address. This makes your site load almost instantly, and you probably don’t feel slow then. However, this doesn’t mean that others may have the same experience as you do, especially those visiting your site for the first time.
We recommend you to test your website speed using a tool, such as GTmetrix, WebPageTest, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, etc. These are considered as top 4 free website speed test tools of 2018.
2. What Slows Down Your WordPress Website and Solutions
There are various causes of a slow WordPress website, and we believe that once you have understanding of them, you can easily improve your site performance with the best ways, even if you’re not a tech-geek.
Here are some primary causes and recommended solutions:
Web Hosting
When starting your website, you should consider which web hosting company to trust your content with, because your WordPress hosting service plays an important role in your site loading speed.
Most bloggers decide to go with a shared server for a budget reason. However, on that shared environment, there will be several other hosting accounts, and the server resources will be used by many others. If your neighboring sites use up too many resources, the entire server may crash, which in turn slows down your website performance.
Therefore, we recommend you to choose a good shared hosting provider like SiteGround or BlueHost. They are not only affordable but also offer extra measures to optimize your website for performance.
WordPress Configuration with Caching Plugins
If your WordPress website is not serving cached pages, your server will be overloaded, especially when multiple people visit your site at the same time. This causes your site to be quite slow or even crash entirely. In this case you are recommended to use a caching plugin.
The caching plugin caches your WordPress posts and pages as static files after the first load, then serves the version of static files to subsequent users. By this way, it reduces the page loading process on the server.
There are a number of awesome WordPress caching plugins available, but we suggest using W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache (free) or WP Rocket (premium) plugin.
However, using a caching plugin may prevent you from seeing new changes you just made to your site. All the updates will appear later when the time set to keep the cache file expires and you clear the browser’s history and cookie. You could deactivate the plugin every time you’re about to update your blog, then reactivate it after all changes are done.
Pages with Oversized Images
The image size is directly proportional to the website loading time. It takes a huge amount of time to load photos even when you have a fast server response time. So if possible, do not upload images directly from your phone or camera. Try to resize and optimize them for your website instead, using photo editing software.
Bad Plugins
While loading your website, your server will also load other elements on your site, including all plugins installed. Each one has its own pack of codes to executes. If any of the plugins is poorly coded, it can significantly slow down your website. So you should control plugins on your site and only use up-to-date, well-coded ones. Don’t forget to check out their positive feedback and approval rating from other users before installing one.
External Scripts
Such external scripts as web fonts loaders, Google ads, affiliate program widget, etc. may eat up your website speed since they are loading from other servers into your blog. Take consideration before using any of them as well.
Besides, there are also many other ways to reduce the loading time and boost the performance of your website, for instance:
Use Excerpt on Homepage and Archives – to helps readers navigate your posts more easily and reduce page speed
Keep Your WordPress Site Updated – to help fix security issues and bugs, prevent being slow and unreliable on your site.
Don’t Upload Videos Directly to WordPress – but via a video hosting service like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc., to avoid the problem with bandwidth.
Split Comments into Pages – to reduce loading speed, especially when your posts have a lot of comments.
Now that you know major causes for low page loading speed, let’s give your website a check and take steps to improve its performance!
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