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What You Can Do to Increase Your WordPress Website Speed (5 Steps to Improve Your Site Speed)

Sep 6, 2023

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The slow loading of websites will negatively impact your company. The constant barrage of information have reduced the human attention span and have caused users to lose interest more quickly than ever before.

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If your site takes lengthy to load, prospective customers could simply move on to another site.

There are a few great strategies you can use to boost the speed of your WordPress website's speed. Utilizing plugins, and following the best practices can increase the speed at which your website loads and keep your visitors to your site.

In this guide this guide, we'll discuss five methods to increase your WordPress speed. We'll also explore the factors that slow down your website, 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)

The time it takes to load your website is the time that it takes your site to display all content fully. This content can include images, videos, and text-based components.

The factors that are most likely to slow your site down include:

  • Images
  • Videos
  • Slow plug-ins
  • Caching is not working.
  • External scripts

It penalizes slow websites and makes them appear lower on the search results list and makes it difficult for your customers to find your business.

There is a cost-free tool like IsItWP speed test. IsItWP Speed Test to test the speed of your WordPress site's performance.

When you have a baseline, you can begin making changes to speed up the loading speed. You can also use this tool to run tests during the update process to determine which strategies will be most efficient for your website.

How to Increase Your WordPress Speed of Your Website (5 Steps to Take)

If you're aware of the importance of the speed of your WordPress website's speed is important, let's take a look at some simple ways you can decrease the time it takes for your website to load.

1. Pick your theme and plugins carefully

Themes and plugins play an important role as components of WordPress websites. However, poorly-designed themes or plugins can cause a significant slowdown to your website.

When selecting a new theme or plugin to use on your site, it is important to

  • Look up user ratings as well as reviews. This can give you a good idea for how the plugin or theme performs for other users.
  • Find out if the theme or plugin has recently been updated. Tools that receive frequent updates from their creators will be more reliable and are likely to have better optimization.
  • You can test the staging site's performance before as well as after incorporating the new tool to determine if there are any significant drops.

2. Optimize Your Images

For reducing the effect of your media files You can think about using an image optimization tool like ShortPixel. ShortPixel plugin:

The plugin is integrated into your WordPress site. It enables you to optimize images of most file types such as PNG and JPEG. It is very user-friendly, and allows you to compress all photos on your site by a single button.

It is possible to use this ShortPixel plugin to improve images using Media > Bulk ShortPixel > Optimize Now:

The tool for bulk optimization can make all of the images from your WordPress library in one go.

You may also want to use "lazy loading". This option prevents your website from displaying images until the user scrolls down and reaches them. This helps to speed the loading process.

You can allow lazy loading using the help of a plugin such as Smush:

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

When you enable lazy loading, it is possible to customize various settings, including the types of media, exclusions and even script positions. Smush is also an excellent choice to compress and shrink images even if you do not use ShortPixel.

3. Make use of a Caching Plugin (or a Host with Built-In Caching)

Caching is an essential process that helps your website load faster. It makes and saves copies of your site within a place called a cache. This means that the site doesn't need to be reloaded with each new visitor. The server is able to retrieve the information from the cache for any the first time, meaning it will take much less time to load.

One of the easiest ways to cache your site is by using the plugin WordPress Super Cache. It employs a variety of methods, including simple static files for general users, and "super-cached" static file for experts:

You can use WordPress Super Cache to store your site's data via Settings > WP Super Cache > Caching On:

Within this dashboard, users can change your cache settings by navigating to the Advancedtab. There, you can choose the users who are able to access cached content, as well as how long your caches last, and if you wish to make sure that your caches are delivered by an expert.

Its integrated caching is the best available, which makes it by far the fastest WordPress website host out there.

4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

An Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers spread across the world. Each of them stores a cache of the data on your website as well as when a visitor goes to your site they'll receive content from the CDN nearest to their location. Your website is therefore able to load a lot more quickly since there's less geographical distance.

There are many CDN alternatives available, including Cloudflare. Sign up to an account that is paid and begin making use of this top CDN to get your website to your visitors quicker.

5. Use Excerpts

If your site has blogs, you'll likely want to display the blog's content. But, showing the blog posts in their entirety will slow down your website's speed. Instead, consider displaying excerpts of your blog posts on your website's landing pages.

As an example, you'll see on the blog landing page that the page does not display blog the entire blog posts. The page displays a couple of paragraphs from each, and enables the user to click on the heading to read the rest:

In accordance with your theme you might need to modify your settings so that excerpts are displayed through Settings > Reading > for each blog post Include > Summary:

You can then easily customize the excerpts of newly published posts by going to Posts > Add New. From here there is a button to select Exerpt > Post:

There, you can compose a custom-written excerpt which is displayed in lieu of your entire post. You can also include excerpts in already published posts.

Conclusion

The slow loading of your website can cause a lot of damage to your company. If your customers click away they could be missing out on opportunities for conversions. Thus, enhancing your WordPress website's performance is one of the most important things you can do.

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

  1. Cut down on the size of your images through the ShortPixel plug-in, and consider lazy loading.
  2. Make use of an Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare to cut down on loading time.
  3. Use post excerpts to increase loading speed.

Are you looking for answers concerning how you can speed up your WordPress website's speed? Let us know in the comment section below!

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