All website owners must know how to increase the speed of their WordPress website. Why you ask? It’s because the page loading speed of your website influences its traffic ratio, bounce rate, conversion, user satisfaction and even business revenue. Having the best website design is not enough, you will have to work on more things to make your site function well.
If you ignore little things and because of that your WordPress website becomes slow, this is an ultimate loss for you. Over time, as our websites become complex and accumulate more data, they become less efficient. This is normal but this could slow down the speed of your site if left unchecked.
Here are some ways you can make your WordPress website load faster:
Optimize the images
Websites become slow due to the images you use. If you are using more images to make your website look attractive, it is going to take more bandwidth to load and this will reduce the performance on a serious note. So, start by compressing the images.
There is a plugin called WP Smush that can be used to reduce the size of the images. It also strips the hidden metadata that may be taking up extra space. You can also search for other free compression tools.
Use a lightweight theme
The theme you use also affects the speed of your website. Remember, not all the WordPress themes are created equal. Having a great user interface design is going to be meaningless if your website does not load in the first place. So, don’t just go for a theme that is rich in features. Choose a minimal theme that has all the important features you might need now and in future.
Clean your database
Your database starts accumulating clutter it slows down the speed of your website. That is why it is important to have regular cleanups for reducing not just the size of your database but to make your site load faster. To clean your database, you can use a plugin called WP Optimize to get rid of the draft posts, spam comments, unnecessary revisions in the posts etc.
Get rid of the unused plugins
Your site might have become a plugin hoarder and this could be affecting its performance. One way to avoid this is to update your plugins on a regular basis and delete the ones that you don’t use so that your website becomes speedy.
In order to delete an unused plugin, you will have to deactivate it first. Then go to the list of inactive plugins and delete the ones that you don’t want. The same also applies for the themes that are now outdated or you don’t use.
Disable the trackbacks and pingbacks
It is a good idea to keep both of them turned off. Just go to the settings of your website, select discussion and click on ‘allow link notifications’ from other blogs. Uncheck this and you are done.
Move to a dedicated server
If you started your WordPress website on a shared server because your budget was low, it is time you consider upgrading it. Shared hosting is affordable but it can reduce the performance of your website big time and this could cost you a lot of business. To provide maximum uptime to your website, invest in a dedicated hosting plan that offers you complete resources on a single server.
