A fast WordPress website is a must nowadays. Google attaches great value to it and your visitors to your website, especially the mobile visitors, find a fast website important. A fast website ensures that visitors do not immediately drop out and start looking for a competitor. Read the tips in this article to speed up your WordPress website.
Why a fast WordPress website is important
- Search engines such as Google will place websites that load faster higher in the search results than websites that load slowly. It is one of the factors that ensure that your website gets higher on Google.
- If it takes longer than 2 seconds for the website to load, approximately 45% of visitors will click the website away and look for a competitor. A fast website ensures that the visitors stay on your website.
- Mobile website traffic is increasing and connections via mobile devices are often a bit slower. A fast website ensures that mobile visitors also continue to visit your website.
What does the website speed depend on?
Keep in mind that different pages can produce different results. The speed of the page depends on, among other things:
- the page size
- how many requests the page makes to external sources such as a Facebook like box
- whether the page is cached or not
- what content is on the page
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How can you test the speed of your website?
There are several websites where you can test the speed of your website:
8 tips to increase the speed of your WordPress website
1. Choose the right web hosting partner
One of the most important factors for a fast WordPress website is hosting. Often entrepreneurs look for the cheapest but not what the hosting provider has to offer. Cheap hosting is often on a shared server where you share the server’s resources with multiple websites. If another customer uses a lot of resources from the server, your website will get fewer and therefore become slower. There may also be problems with hacked websites that make your website unavailable.
2. Use a lightweight WordPress theme or framework
There are many beautifully designed WordPress themes available. The themes are equipped with beautiful sliders, widgets, and other dynamic elements. Only all these elements have consequences for the speed of your website.
Therefore choose a lightweight theme and be careful with adding all kinds of dynamic elements. The standard WordPress is a great lightweight theme. You can also opt for a WordPress framework such as Genesis or a framework that uses Bootstrap. These frameworks take the website speed into account.
3. Pay attention to the size of your images
Images cause the page file size to increase. And the larger the file, the longer it takes for the page to be downloaded and shown to the visitor. It is best to shrink the image before uploading. If you have not done this, there are also plugins that ensure that the images are reduced during upload or you can reduce the images afterwards. You can use the free WordPress plugin WP Smush for this.
4. Minimize your JavaScript and CSS files
If you use Google PageSpeed Insights, you will probably be recommended to reduce your JavaScript and CSS files. You can do this yourself using the Google guidelines. Or you can use a plugin such as Autoptimize. This plugin reduces and compresses JavaScript and CSS files, caches them, moves CSS to the head of your page and scripts to the footer of your page. You will get the best results by using a cache plugin. See the following point for this.
5. Use a cache plugin
WordPress normally makes pages dynamic. This means that the moment a visitor retrieves a page, the data is retrieved from the database. You can understand that this requires resources from the server every time and delays the display of the page.
A cache plugin creates a ready-made version of the page and places it in a quickly accessible place. It ensures that the page can be loaded faster and displayed to the visitor faster. A few good WordPress cache plugins are W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.
6. Keep your database clean
By storing as little data as possible in your database, you ensure that the database stays fast and the website loads faster. You can limit the number of page versions, delete SPAM comments, clean up unused users and clean up plugins and themes that you no longer use.
7. Remove unused plugins
As indicated above, deactivate and remove plugins that you no longer use. This ensures that the backups become smaller and that the server needs less time to make a backup and therefore needs fewer resources.
8. Use as few external scripts as possible
Calling an external script often means an extra load for the server. So limit this as much as possible. Use only essential scripts such as Google Analytics.
These were my 8 tips to increase the speed of your WordPress website. Do you have any additions or comments yourself? Leave this in the comment field below.