WordPress is the greatest and most popular CMS platform all over the world. Various small to big-sized businesses rely on it for their long-term growth. And not to mention that it has brought many thousands of success stories over the years. The most important reason why people use WordPress is its speed and simplicity. But due to numerous technical conditions, the speed seems to be compromised sometimes. With these top 12 tips though, you will learn how to speed up your WordPress site.
1- Your WordPress Hosting Is Important When it Comes to Speed
If you are using a certain WordPress host and finding it not doing well with the speed, perhaps it’s time to switch to another. There are plenty of WordPress hosting providers out there. Bluehost, SiteGround, Dreamhost, GoDaddy, and more. Among them, finding the fastest hosting that also suits your business will be hard. But you can check out their reviews and features before going for one.
2- Select a Lightweight and Fast Theme
You are maybe attracted to beautiful themes that come with creative designs. But if the themes are not speedy, then you will lose a lot of visitors. We are all busy people and we like things that are fast and effective. If your theme is slowing your WordPress site down, you can change it immediately. There are some great online stores available where you can buy an effective WordPress theme. Themeforest is an example.
3- Install a Cache Plugin for WordPress
When you are creating a page in WordPress, the CMS builder goes through a process. The process helps WP to collect information about the page, combine them together, and display it to your visitors. But the process can slow down your website if there are so many people visiting at once. But a good cache plugin can speed up your website about 5 times more.
4- Reduce Image Sizes for Speed
Images and GIFs are important to add to your content because they increase user engagement. But if the image sizes are not in a good condition, it will slow down your website more than bringing new visitors. The key is to reduce the size of your images. But make sure they are not compromising on the quality. If you can’t do this alone, you can take help from WP Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer, etc. WordPress cache plugins.
5- Limit the Number of Comments Per Page
It is a good idea to reply to every comment your get on your site. But Too many comments can slow down your page loading time. You can break the comment sections of the pages to reduce the time it takes to load the comment. Go to Settings -> Discussion and check the box next to the “Break comments into pages” option.
6- Keep Your WordPress Site Updated
Keep your WP website updated always. It will resolve any bugs or issues as well as security issues. Along with your WordPress website lean , the themes and plugins need regular updates too. If you don’t update those essentials regularly, it can slow down your site and make it unreliable.
8- Delete the Plugins and Themes You Don’t Use
Another tip to speed up your WordPress website: don’t keep the plugins and themes you don’t use. People say that too many plugins can slow down your site. But that’s not completely true. The ones that are poorly designed do and the ones that you don’t require at all also slow down your site. Always keep lightweight and functional plugins on your site. Remove the ones you don’t need.
9- Reduce Post Revisions
Post Revisions is the feature that saves every edit that you make of a page. If there are so many revisions, it slows down your site. You can select the number of revisions per post by adding a code in the wp-config.php file. define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4 ); You can change the number (4) to your preferred one.
10- Perform a Site Speed Diagnosis
You can use the WP Engine Speed Tool to identify how fast or slow your site loads. This will help you diagnose your site performance in terms of speed. And you will have space for improvement. All you need to do is providing the URL to your site and they will send you a detailed analysis on how to improve your speed.
11- Minify JS and CSS Files
You can reduce the number of CSS and JS calls the sizes of their files to speed up your WordPress site. You need to remove the unnecessary numbers from your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. This includes:
- White space characters
- Newline characters
- Comments
- Block delimiters
It reduces the load time of your site because it reduces the code numbers requested from the server.
12- Clean Up the Media Library
One time, you will find images on your media library that you don’t use. But you will have to remove those images to free up storage and save load time. You can do this manually from Add Media -> Media Library -> Unattached. Or use the Media Cleaner plugin that will do the work for you.
Conclusion
If you are still unable to speed up your WordPress website alone, don’t worry. You can check here for an IT recruitment agency Dubai that has experience in WordPress site optimization as well as SEO and in many other fields. In case you need any help, feel free to leave us a comment below.