How can you increase your WordPress website performance? No need to be a programming guru to follow our instructions. Using this guide, you will be able to reduce the number of users who leave the site due to its low performance!
Why does performance matter?
Studies show us that the average person’s attention level significantly decreased.
What does this fact mean for WordPress website owners?
You have just a few seconds to convince the user to not leave your website.
If you check the site speed report, it will likely have some recommendations for performance improvement. However, many of them are technical details that are difficult for beginners.
Some main reasons for the low performance. Briefly.
- Hosting performance. If hosting provider servers have bad hardware or not configured correctly.
- Page size. If images used on the website are not optimized well.
- Plugins. If you use bad plugins, it can overload pages and decrease loading speed.
- External scripts. If you use some heavy scripts (such as advertisement, styles downloaders, etc.).
What can you do to make WordPress site performance better?
If you aren’t techie, the idea to make any changes in your WordPress site can sound horrible. But there are simple steps to take, no coding required.
1. Choose a high-quality hosting
The overall performance of sites depends on hosting very much. When choosing a hosting, it’s better to focus on the following indicators.
Hosting Hardware
The hardware and software components of the hosting should be the highest quality. At first, the server should be located on SSD drives. InterServer hosting service has many hosting plans with different storage and all of them are located on SSD drivers. Here you can find reviews about the tool and the best plan for your WordPress website. More efficient equipment will ensure a high response speed, fast loading pages with content of varying complexity.
Uptime
There is an important parameter that shows how long the hosting is running without interruptions. Uptime is calculated very simply and is shown as a percentage. The higher the uptime, the better the search engine robots can index the site. And the user will not be frustrated because of the disconnection of the site at the wrong time. The good uptime parameter of hosting is considered to be from 99.95% or more.
Location
If hosting has good hardware but located in the USA while your audience is from Europe, it makes very little sense. Сonnection speed will be low due to the large distance between the user and the server To solve this problem…
2. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
Thanks to the lightning speed of the Internet, it is easy to forget that in the end web pages are based on real equipment located at a fairly big distance from you. And sometimes this distance is so big that it can negatively affect the response time. You can solve this problem using the Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Content Delivery Network is a network of servers with specialized software that accelerates the delivery of content to the end-user. Servers are located all over the world so that the response time to site users is minimal. СDN reduces the server traffic, the page loading time and the load on the main server.
3. Minimize CSS, HTML, and JavaScript
Minification is one of the most useful processes for increasing the performance of a site. It reduces the size of files and scripts (HTML, CSS, JS) by removing unnecessary characters, such as spaces and comments from these files.
4. Optimize images
It’s not clear for most of the users how images have much effect on the site loading speed. But high-quality images have a huge impact on almost all the resources of your site.
However, this does not mean you should refuse high-quality images in favor of small and blurry ones. There are many ways to optimize the images of your site. For example, the WordPress plugin Smush provides a convenient way to achieve better performance without losing image quality. Or you can decrease the size of images manually using the right software.
5. Use Caching Plugins
Caching is a well-known mechanism that allows reducing part of the server load. To simplify, a cache is made to store information, allowing the browser to not retrieve it from the server every time. Caching plugins often significantly improve the loading speed of WordPress websites.
5. Change the version of PHP.
It’s rarely used but one of the most productive ways to increase the speed of loading a site. Migrating from PHP 5 to PHP 7 can be difficult for some users. However, the benefits are huge. WordPress productivity doubles when using PHP 7 compared to PHP 5
6. Divide long content into pages
Split large content into smaller parts making them be displayed on different pages. Pagination is often used for a comment section because loading thousands of comments on one page has a serious impact on server resources.
7. Check your WordPress plugins to speed up website loading speed
A few tips to optimize WordPress site plugins.
1) Remove all plugins that are unnecessary. Plugins’ number usually increases over time, so you can collect a lot of unnecessary plugins which will create an unnecessary load on the site.
2) Deactivate unnecessary plugins. Try to use only very important plugins. Some plug-ins do not have to be allowed to work constantly.
Are there some more useful tips?
A few little things that can also help you to speed up the loading of the site/
– Display only announcements of articles on the main page of the site. You do not need to display full articles.
– Separate large articles into pages using the tag.
– Don’t display more than 5-6 articles on the main page.
– Don’t display more than 50 comments under an article.
– Install a site search by Google.
We hope this article will help you to learn and implement some useful tips to speed up your WordPress site and improve its performance in an easy way.
