Life is already full of waiting in line or moments about to happen. People will not tolerate your site to be one of those things. Whether you are selling something through your site or having your own blog, it’s crucial for your business to speed up the WordPress site.
Reasons why you should speed up WordPress
In digital marketing, website quality EQUALS your brand quality!
It may sound odd, but the value of your products will automatically be lowered down if your site is slow or has not been updated in a long time. Your brand reputation depends on the quality of your website, as well as sales and profit.
An incredible 42,6% of sites on the internet are run by WordPress, which speaks of trust and quality. But, having a powerful tool without knowing how to use its powers is a waste. That’s why you should start monitoring WordPress right now.
Being a blogger, a small company, or a non-governmental organization, it’s good for your business to know how some features work. As usual, some of them may sound obvious, yet others are not that easy to detect or solve.
Where to start? Here are some tips:
1. Get yourself a high-performance WordPress hosting most suitable for your business
Considering that every site’s starting point is hosting, you should also start there when thinking about how to speed up a WordPress site. Helpful information to know is that there are a few types of hosting.
• Shared WordPress Hosting is a good starter choice
Excellent for beginners and small projects. The main advantage is it costs less ($3 to $25). On the other hand, dreaming big isn’t about saving money on important things. As soon as the traffic grows, many problems come to the light of the day. Shared hosts, in that case, mean overcrowded servers.
More importantly, issues and errors other sites can face automatically have an impact on yours making it slow and less functional. Before choosing this type, consider whether it matches your business plan.
• DIY VPS WordPress Hosting is a big chance but requires a prior knowledge
Letters stand for “do it yourself on a virtual private server. Doubtless, it gives more options and huge benefits like cloud servers. But, you’ll be facing a double-edged sword. If you’re more of an entrepreneurial mind than a computer expert, this step can be risky.
For those ready and prepared to face this challenge, the price of 5$ to 25$ does sound appalling. But for beginners when time is money, this can be a costly decision that carries too many responsibilities.
2. Type of the site can make a huge difference
Knowing about the hosting, the next thing to know is what type of site is yours. It can be quite important in case you need to speed up the WordPress site.
• The first one we will talk about is static.
The chances that your site belongs to this group are high. Content in static sites is not often changed (perhaps a couple of times a day or a week). People use them for personal and photography blogs, small business sites, or lower volume news sites. If you have this type of site, you can relax. They are easier to maintain, and they’re using fewer caches.
• Another site type is dynamic
Dynamic sites receive and require more attention. They include content used for eCommerce, forums, learning management systems (LMS), but also sites with memberships and community options.
The reason why they are harder to maintain is the frequent change of the data and content. Furthermore, they create a lot of caches due to a large number of visitors and sessions that need to be taken care of.
3. Choose the nearest located server to the target audience
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) can be your best friend when it comes to fast delivery to other locations. Combining its geographically distributed group of servers, information travels at the highest speed. To be sure where they are located, don’t forget about Google Analytics, which will help you be more precise.
4. Always choose an HTTP/2 provider
They are designed to speed up your WordPress site. As long as you have one, you don’t have to worry about sharing domains or combining files.
5. Be careful about your WordPress theme choice
Besides paid themes having advantages over free themes, pay attention to the number of site elements. Having too many sliders, widgets and social icons is never a good idea. Using lightweight themes is a much safer solution.
6. Quality over quantity of the plug-ins
Try avoiding too many plug-ins. Make a decision which of these are the real necessity. Be aware that some of them are naturally slow, so combining by the importance hierarchy is a must-do. Also, changing them often can make them use unnecessary space. Choose the best ones and stick to them.
7. Limit posts on your page
Don’t try to show everything on one page. It looks messy but also harder to load. Even when you open a phone or PC photo gallery, the system will load folders with fewer images faster. A website page is the same. Build segments, don’t overcrowd one.
8. Caches are a very helpful speed-up tool
A good thing about caches is, even though they are one of the most important ways, they are also one of the easiest when it comes to speeding up a WordPress site.
Preparing your food becomes more effective when preparing it for the second time. The same is with caches. As a process of storing resources from one request and reusing them when needed again, it saves a lot of time.
9. Enable GZIP compression
Everything that can be smaller, should be smaller. Advice is that the data should not exceed 25 KB. Tools like GZIP compressor will save up a lot of space and even make your site more professional and organized.
10. Disable hotlinking, pingbacks, and trackbacks
We use the term hotlinking when some website uses another as a resource. Sounds like a good thing, but there is a catch. Whenever it’s loaded, the original one gets loaded too (image for example) and uses your resource too.
Two other things that are not necessary, yet resource-consuming, are pingbacks and trackbacks. They are components that alert you whenever your blog or page receives a link.
Disabling all of them may significantly increase performance and speed up the WordPress site.
Conclusion:
Your site is where your brand “lives”, whatever it may be. If you want to keep it that way, you have to pay attention to the small details. Always choose safe strategies and verified plug-ins over some cheap and temporary solutions.
In today’s fast-paced times, you shouldn’t let yourself be left behind. No matter how good the design or the product is, it all falls into the water if you don’t update and speed up the WordPress site.
