How to Optimize a WordPress Website for Speed

By Fernando Raymond

Well, we do know that WordPress is one of the most popular platforms to use while creating a website or a blog post. It is user friendly and has attracted a lot of website developers and bloggers all over the world. However, WordPress has a slight disadvantage when it comes to speed.

When your website loading speed is slow, it will extensively affect your business. When visitors visit your site they usually have a less than 5 seconds to look through your site and see if there is anything they like. It is quite annoying to visit a website that loads forever; you tend to lose focus in it and move on to the next thing.

There are different ways you can improve speed while using WordPress. You have to use the right security plugins and keep up with the latest upgrades.

Below are things you can do to optimize speed on your WordPress website;

Choosing the best host to work with – many people who have the WordPress platform tend to share their host. It might seem like you are saving much on costs but you are bargaining for unlimited page views. Sharing a host makes the site slow down and it will experience frequent downtime during high traffic. If your business is entirely based online, it is advisable to invest in a good host and relieve yourself from the stress of your site going down during loading. You can also try out hosts like WP engine managed WordPress hosting, which is recommended by many users. It boosts up the sites speed and does not experience any downtime. They have a great customer support system that is well versed in WordPress.
Solid Framework and Theme – using a lightweight kind of framework or theme goes a long way when it comes to speed. It is simple and does not have a lot of features that you will never use which pulls down the speed. The fastest loading framework is usually the simplest which is easier to customize. It will not slow down your process by using excess plugins. Simplicity is everything.
Use effective caching plugins – there are many plugins offered for WordPress but not all of them offer the caching feature. The feature is quite useful and drastically improves page loading time. The most impressive thing about the feature is that you can get it for free at org. It is easy to use, install and activate. When certain elements are cached, the site automatically picks up speed.
Use of Content Delivery Network (CDN) – most online marketers and bloggers make use of the content delivery network. The CDN takes all your static files from your site like JavaScript, images, CSS and many more and lets the visitors download them faster by serving the files on the servers close by. There are different types of content delivery networks to use like Max CDN or Free-CDN which is simple, affordable, and user friendly.
Automatically Optimized Images – images are supposed to be reduced into sizable images on your site, without tampering with the quality. Yahoo has it, a feature which offers the same. There are free plugins that offer the same process and outcome.
Optimizing your homepage – the first thing that attracts visitors to your page is the homepage. Optimizing the homepage to have fast loading images and content is the most important thing to look after as an owner. There are a few things you can look at so as to ensure the optimization homepage is running smoothly and faster. Reduce the number of posts on your page, remove inactive plugins, and keep your website content minimal, show excerpts and not full posts. Simple and well-focused homepage design will help your site load faster,
Database – there are plugins available for optimizing your database. To reduce the overload on your site, the plugin reduces spam, drafts, tables and post revisions. Get a managing database that is able to schedule dates which will optimize your site.
Disable hotlink and leeching your content – Hot linking is used to refer to theft of bandwidth, where other sites are able to link directly to your images from their articles or sites; this makes your load go higher. Your site will automatically have many visitors. Your site will become popular as you create custom images on your site for a regular basis. The images should appear clearly.
Adding expires header – just the same way there are expiry dates on any products, one has to add an expiry header to static resources. This enables the visitors to your page not to fetch any static content like JavaScript and CSS. By cutting off any static content, it will in return cut down on the load time for your popular users.
Adjust gravatar images – this is the image that always appears when you have a blank image set on the site. By adjusting the gravatar image to nothing or disabling the feature throughout the site, you significantly up your site speed. This can be easily enabled from your settings tab. The images take up the loading speed as it processes the images as a display whereas there is nothing to show. It is advisable to disable the feature or remove the image if it is not in use. The speed will pick up as it will be loading the contents and not images.

Conclusion

WordPress is a user friendly platform that serves all types of online marketers and bloggers. It is popular all around the world because of its user-friendly feature. It is known to attract hackers through its vulnerability and have slow speed when it comes to loading your site content. However, not all hope is lost with WordPress.

You can simply install and upgrade to the latest plugins that are affordable to you as the user. The plugins are easy to use and install. All you have to do is make sure your site is updated with the latest versions and maintain it.