The speed of your website is the biggest factor for retaining your visitors and decreasing the bounce rate of the website. No one wants to wait today for loading a website, if your website is slow, you are going to lose your visitors and search engine visibility. Yes, thatâs right, If your website is not good with speed, search engine ranking will get impacted.
We are sure that you have got an idea of how valuable is your website loading speed. Most of the websites are built using WordPress because it is the best CMS for business and personal blogging.
How can you check website speed?
Here is the answer. Before moving further in the optimizing process, check your website speed by Google PageSpeed Insight or GTMetrix. Both tools will give you insights about your website speed and recommendations for improvement. If you are not a tech-savvy WordPress Development Service Providers can help you to get things optimized for you.
1- Good Hosting Provider
Choosing a good host provider is essential for hosting any website. Recently we saw a case on which server speed was very slow, it was about 35s. We recommend our client to change the hosting plan immediately. Maximum shared hosting host multiple websites on a single server that impacts the server speed.
2- Avoid slow themes
The badly coded theme always takes time to load, when selecting a theme, make sure to check its speed. Consult with a developer or online marketer before buying or selecting a theme for your site. We spent hours of time to optimize a WordPress website which was coded very badly.
3- Choosing Plugins
Do not install various plugins, use only necessary plugins so that the extra burden of loading plugins will be reduced. Before installing a plugin, check feedback, number of active installs, etc to make sure you have a good plugin.
4- Optimize Images
Images take time to load on browsers which slow the website performance. For example, if your image size is 1024 px and your image requirement on the page is 650 px, though, CSS will reduce the size of the image for display on the page but the size will be the same as uploaded. You can use photo editing tools to reduce the size of the image. Photoshop has an option to âsave for the webâ. Another best option can be WP Smush.it, this plugin will do it automatically for you.
5- Codes Improvement
On many websites, we have noticed the developer put CSS and Scripts in the <head> tag which also slows the speed. JavaScript slows the page speed if it is placed in the <head> tag. Make sure to place JavaScript in <body> tag. Also, you can add HTML codes in the place of PHP whenever it is possible.
6- Database Optimization
WP-Optimize is the best plugin that I found for optimizing the database routinely. It works automatically and manually both. The plugin removes your trashed data, spam comments, etc.
7- Gzip Compression
You can compress all website data by using Gzip, compressed version of your website loads faster on the browsers. To enable the Gzip you can go to Cpanel of your hosting. If you donât find the Gzip option there, install a plugin called W3 Total Cache or you can also do it from WordPress. You can find an option to enable gzip at www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/options.php. Just change the GZip option from 0 to 1 to enable.