Today, the importance of websites has risen hastily, and customers are demanding websites for a successful business. They considered the website proof non-fraudulent, and they refused to accept a company that does not owe a website. Websites helping eCommerce and many online platforms create a website and blog for you. As you all know, one of the best platforms to create websites for others is WordPress, but the speed of WordPress is necessary to consider. If the performance of WordPress is slow, it has to improve the speed, and in this post, you will see guidelines to increase the speed of WordPress.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a primary tool for creating websites and blogs where it is a content management system (CMS). The nature of your business is not a big issue, and this WordPress can create a website for all kinds of business. It is free software to download and use, and you must have WordPress hosting. WordPress is completely flexible where you can create your website on your wish, and the complete control of designing it is in your hand.
Why is WordPress site speed important?
It is always frustrating to use a dead slow website, and most visitors won’t wait until the content load. They easily get annoyed when it is slow and switch to some other websites, and this situation is more related when you are opening the web page on mobile. Here are some reasons why the speed of WordPress is important?
- SEO rankings – The websites can be opened on both mobile and desktop, and Google uses the site’s speed for ranking purposes. Search engine optimization’s ranking for a website is determined based on its speed, and the speed is necessary among various competitive niches in many strong sites.
- Conversion rates – conversion rate is essential for online business, and when the website’s speed gets slow, the conversion rate also gets decreased. Experts said that 100-millisecond delays could hurt more in conversion, and approximately 7% of conversion may decrease.
- Bounce rate – When a site gets very slow, people jump to the next page, so the bounce rate gets higher. The bounce rate varies on a seconds’ basis.
Guidelines to speed up the WordPress
After learning the importance of the site’s speed, now it is time for learning the guideline of speed-up WordPress, and those are listed here.
- Use fast WordPress hosting:
Hosting is an essential factor for a website, and when you have poor WordPress hosting, your website will surely slow down. In previous days, most everyone used a shared hosting provider that offers emails, bandwidth, domains etc., unlimitedly, but its shared hosting environment fails to maintain the website’s speed. Since the same server space is shared with several other websites and you cannot be sure about how many users are using it, the speed will decrease automatically. The technology has developed a lot, and there are several hosting available for WordPress. Better implement the best and effective WordPress hosting and increase the website’s speed.
- Use a lightweight WordPress framework/ theme:
WordPress is very popular among people since it has themes with energetic elements, widgets, social icons and many things. It might be the reason to reduce the speed of the website. Are you confused about how the excellent themes reduce the site’s speed? Don’t get confused that having higher page sizes and too many elements may cause a delay in your website. The best solution to this is using lightweight frameworks or themes that will fit websites. In such cases, you won’t find the delay in websites, and you can use the default WordPress themes.
- Remove unused themes and plugins:
The next guidance to speed up your WordPress is deleting/ removing the plugins and themes which are not in usage. Apart from the site’s performance, these unused plugins and themes are always nearby security vulnerabilities. Before deleting plugins, first, you have to deactivate the unused plugins and then go to inactivate plugins for deleting the unwanted or no longer used plugins. When you want to delete the themes, go to appearance and then themes and remove the one which has not been in usage for long days.
- Use a Content Delivery Network:
The internet user may be located in any corner of the world, and if the site visitor is too far away from where your site is hosted, then the speed of the site decreases automatically. Content delivery network (CDN) will help you increase the site’s speed for any visitors to different locations. Different places have various data centers, and this CDN keeps a copy of your website in each data centre, and it helps to provide the server from the nearest location of the visitor.
- Cleanup WordPress database:
Too much data in the database will maximize the size, and the backup size will be huge. It is better to delete the unwanted data from the database where it is required to delete the fake users, spam comments, old drafts of your content, etc. Due to this process, the size of the database will be reduced, increasing the speed of WordPress.
- Allow WordPress caching:
WordPress creates a web page dynamically for each visitor when requesting a page. To increase the speed of the web page, it is good to save the page that is dynamically created and serve that to the next visit where there is no need to create again. Experts said this is called caching, and for better internal functions, WordPress is using this caching technique in several places. WordPress caching helps to increase the speed of the website.
- Improve your PHP engine:
For generating a web page, a code has to be executed from PHP, and this PHP is open-source software. Always check the PHP engine and update the PHP engine’s version whenever required. As the PHP engine also plays an essential role in the performance of WordPress. You can also raise the speed by optimizing the website’s images, and it is a good idea to be followed.
Bottom line:
When you follow the guidelines mentioned above, you can easily reduce the website’s loading time, which will result in increasing the experience of the visitors. It is always a risk to keep your website’s performance at a low level and start to use the guidelines immediately for increasing the performance of WordPress. It is common for both desktop users and mobile device users.