How To Boost Your Site Performance On WordPress

WordPress can give us rather fancy and efficient sites. However, these aesthetics and functions do not hold much value if the sites are slow to load. Eventually, visitors lose interest very soon. Let us take a look at some exciting techniques to boost your site performance.

Why Boost Your Site Performance In WordPress?

Upload Speed

Studies have shown that there is a chance that 47% of site visitors may leave if the site loading time exceeds 2 seconds. Click here to see how quickly well-optimized websites can actually load. 

Thus, it is highly recommended to improving the loading speed of your website to retain your visitors.

Attract Online Buyers

People who are most likely to be impatient are online buyers who might bounce from one website to the other because of slowness. Hence, if you have an e-commerce or online business site, then boosting the speed will invite more buyers and improve overall profitability.

Website Ranking

Search engines rank different websites based on loading speed. If the website takes time to load, then it is usually ranked lower. So, boosting the site performance can put your websites at the top of relevant searches.

Tricks To Boost Site Performance

Good Web Hosting Provider

The speed of the site depends on the web hosting provider who is supporting the website. It is a good idea to look for hosts which work on shared hosting as they usually come with unlimited bandwidth. However, the downside of it is that it can run slow during peak hours because of increased traffic. 

Hence, another option you can use is cloud hosting. Unlike before, the cost of cloud hosting providers has come down which is why you can buy dedicated servers on a number of cloud hosting platforms. Setting up these servers can be a tough job but with the help of web hosting providers, it can be done with a simple click.

Right Image Sizes

The loading time of a site is also related to the number and size of images present on that particular page. Hence, you need to reduce the size of the images but in doing so, you have to be careful not to compromise their quality.

 A trick to get the job done faster is to make sure you use plugins available out there instead of doing them with software like Photoshop. Image optimization plugins like Smush, and ShortPixel Image Optimizer enable the user to do anything with the images including image optimization. 

Using a CDN

Websites can be accessed from anywhere in the world but the page loading speed depends on the location the users are in. Using a Content Delivery Networks or a CDN can come in handy as it keeps the site loading speed to a minimum. 

The function of a CDN is to provide the visitors the web pages from the nearest available locations. This is the reason CDN keeps a copy of the websites in different datacenters which are located in various locations. So, it is a good idea to choose a good CDN so that visitors all around the world can access it.

Correct WordPress Theme

WordPress themes come with an array of features including widgets, sliders, and social icons among other items. But apart from making the page attractive, it also makes it heavy. Therefore, it is important to check the elements you want on your page. 

It is ideal to choose lightweight themes; in most cases, the default WordPress themes fit the description. Likewise, if you want to opt for a feature-rich website, it is better to choose a theme that has a good foundation or framework. 

Site Speed Diagnosis Test

It is recommended to run a diagnosis test like the WordPress Speed Test because it will help you ascertain the cause of slowness. Once the test is concluded, the user receives a report with details of the slowness. 

As you are using WordPress, you can also use Page Performance which is present in the user portal to assess the page loading speed. Similar to the test, it also provides recommendations on how to improve the page loading speed. 

GZIP Compression

At some point of time or the other, we have all compressed files because it saves disk space. Based on a similar logic, GZIP compression is used on the web to do the same job. Enabling this option will help to bring down the bandwidth, and usage. This will, in turn, reduce the overall time taken to access these websites. 

The process followed by GZIP is to simply unzip all the files which are compressed when the visitor tries to access the website. This reduces the bandwidth usage to a great extent which helps in loading the web pages faster. 

You can use Enable Gzip Compression plugin for this purpose.

Disable Unwanted Plugins

If there are unwanted plugins in a WordPress website, it is bound to add a lot of useless web files. Moreover, it increases the size of the backup files and puts unnecessary pressure on the servers while these files are generated. So, here it would be a prudent decision to remove these unwanted plugins and at the same time find alternate methods to automate or scheduled tasks. Usually, such services are provided by third-party service providers, therefore, finding a good one is ideal. 

Minify CSS And JS Files

You can reduce the JS and CSS calls on the relevant pages to bring down the size of these files. Once reduced, the site loading speed increases. If you have some idea about the WordPress themes, you can do a bit of manual fixing to reduce and optimize the JS and CSS files

Conclusion

It is safe to say that lower loading time improves the visitor experience and will increase traffic on the website. This holds for every device, whether it is a desktop, laptop or other mobile device. Therefore, it is a good idea to look for ways to boost your site performance in WordPress to attract more visitors and improve the SERPs of your website.