Ultimate guide to Speed up WordPress site

Improving the response time of any Website is critical for the growth of any business.

You may ask WHY?

Website load speed may cause many issues like bounce rate, user satisfaction, conversions, and user loyalty. These factors usually impact the credibility of the website. A report by the Daily Telegraph suggests that Human attention span is decreasing with the passage of time. You need to consider this factor while making a strategy for your website. It will help to achieve your objectives.

Human Attention Span Comparison
Human Attention Span Comparison

We have written for webmasters and WordPress professionals. It will help you gain a solid understanding of this domain. We have created this guide for WordPress Webmasters. WordPress is the most widely used Content Management System in the world. This guide will give you a clear understanding to Speed up WordPress Site. There are numerous techniques to speed up WordPress. We have listed the top techniques for you.
Now, it’s time to enjoy the ultimate performance of your WordPress site.
How to Check Speed of your Site?

Which elements affect the speed of your Site?

  • Web Hosting
  • Page Size
  • Wrong Selection of Plugin, Themes

How to Speed up WordPress Site?

  • Optimize your Website Home Page
  • Compress Media Files
  • Update Timely
  • Use Light Weight Themes
  • Clean your database
  • Minify JavaScript and CSS Files

How to Check Speed of your Site?

Website Speed Test
Website Speed Test

First things first, analyze the speed of your website before creating an action plan. We need to analyze the elements that need improvement. A proper strategy based on Analysis can give us good results. There is a range of tools available to evaluate the Performance and speed of your website. We have created a list of free useful tools for you. It will help you to evaluate and speed up the WordPress site.

S No Tool Name Tool URL
1 Page Speed Insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
2 Pingdom https://tools.pingdom.com/
3 Gtmetrix https://gtmetrix.com/

Trends are suggesting that people are switching to mobile devices from Desktops and laptops. Your Website should be optimized for your mobile device users as well. Now, it’s time to evaluate the speed of your website for your mobile device users as well.

 

S No Tool Name Tool URL
1 Think with Google https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/feature/testmysite
2 WEBPAGETEST https://www.webpagetest.org/

What elements decrease the speed of your Site?

Web Hosting

Web Hosting
Web Hosting

A reliable web hosting provider gives you a firm foundation to achieve your objectives. The three main factors to analyze reliability are load time, uptime and Technical/Customer Support by the hosting service. Small businesses tend to opt for cheap web hosting services more without considering the reliability of that service. This cheap hosting service affects the performance of your website severely. We highly recommend our clients not to fall in the trap of Affiliate Marketers. We see all day long marketing campaign of different Web Hosting Companies. Properly analyze your business needs and then select the best option for your Website. You can hire services of Consultant as well for an expert opinion. We have listed some fine web hosting services for you.

 

S No Hosting Company Name Load time Uptime Cost/month
1 Blue Host 425 ms 99.99% 2.75$
2 Host Gator Cloud 419 ms 99.97% 2.99$
3 Site Ground 714 ms 99.99% 3.95$
4 Hostinger 385 ms 99.87% 1.45$
5 iPage 821 ms 99.98% 1.99$

Page Size

Reduce Page Size
Reduce Page Size

Page Size is a crucial part of Web page load speed. It ultimately affects the overall site speed. The quantity of content affects the loading time of the Website. Experts suggest keeping minimum content on the home page. The homepage is the place from where your visitor begins the journey. The start should be smooth to convert a visitor into a customer. A study by Kiss Metrics suggests, 40% of visitors abandoned a website that takes more than 3 seconds. This is quite alarming for businesses. Again, you need to consider mobile device users as well who get fed-up more quickly than desktop users. You need to create an excellent strategy to capture the segment.

Want us to optimize your Website?

Wrong Selection of Plugins and Theme

People think this is an exaggeration but it is true. This is same as you select a wrong tire size for your vehicle. WordPress is an open source CMS. This is a blessing as well as trouble at the same time. There are thousands of free plugin and themes available. The free lunch traps Webmasters especially new businesses. They install it without evaluating the need for it. Webmasters should evaluate their needs. Install Plugin and themes that are only necessary for their Website. Additionally, choosing the best available options from required is also necessary to speed up a WordPress site. WordPress doesn’t set a cap on the number of the plugin you can install. This is your job to evaluate and install as less as possible plugins for your website. John Hughes performed a number of tests to prove this point. He concluded that adding each plugin adds up time to overall load time of the website.
Obviously, Google doesn’t love a slow loading website and it results in the decline of your search engine ranking.

How to Speed up WordPress Site?

Optimize your Website Home Page

Optimize Home Page
Optimize Home Page

People emphasize too much in SEO of their posts but neglects optimization of Homepage. This is the first page which people come across when they visit your website. Your home page should clearly convey about your company. So, the visitor can understand the purpose of your business. There are hundreds of brands competing with each other in the same niche. The unique Selling point of your brand should be clear. Guide your visitors to other pages. Don’t put any content on the homepage which you can place on any other page. The homepage should contain only vital content of your business. Some of you may be thinking about how it is related to SEO or can impact speed. Let me tell you. These steps will help your visitors to smoothly navigate on your website. It will decrease the bounce rate. Search Engine demotes websites that have a high bounce rate. Giving your visitors a clear idea about your website will help you to convert them into clients. It will also help your business to achieve its goals.

Compress Media Files

File Compression
File Compression

You have a very compelling website. Every post contains infographics and media and all the requirements to achieve a prominent position in Search Engine. But Imagine A visitor visits your website, and your website took a long time to load. There is a high probability that he will leave the Website. You will not only lose a visitor but also a potential customer. Now, here is a million dollar question.

Want us to optimize your Website?

 

What is the right strategy to retain client and convert visitors into customers? The solution is quite simple. You need to install a Media optimization Plugin that suits your needs. There are multiple benefits of compressing media file. The one very basic idea of compressing media is discussed above. Furthermore, compressing media increase the speed of your website which in return increases your SEO ranking. Website load speed is part of the SEO algorithm.
These are some Plugins which will help you to optimize your media.

S No Plugin Name Active Installation
1 Smush Image Compression and Optimization 1 Million +
2 EWWW Image Optimizer 700,000+
3 ShortPixel Image Optimizer 100,000+

Update Timely

You have a wonderful website but if you don’t update it in a timely manner. Performance of your WordPress Website will start declining. Outdated themes, plugins or even old WordPress version tend to affect your site speed. This is very essential to update all related elements of your WordPress Website. It maintains the performance of your Website. Furthermore, these updates are usually released to increase the performance of WordPress Site. Specifically, speaking about WordPress update. It is a product of a community of developers who release these updates free. They fix bugs, enhance performance and add new features in every new version of it. Security is the most important factor in these updates. WordPress is the favorite product of hackers due to its global popularity. So, continuous efforts are needed to improve the security of WordPress Websites.

Use Light Weight Themes

There are thousands of themes available. The question is how you will select the best option. Choosing the right option is important for your website. You need to evaluate the following factors before buying or investing your time to search for a nice theme for your website. We will suggest you, hire the services of a professional if you are a first timer. It will save you time and restrict you from making the wrong decision.

  • Make a list of feature you want in your theme
  • Choose a responsive theme
  • Select theme based on your brand logo and company marketing strategy
  • Consider buying a paid theme if you don’t have a strict budget constraint
  • Select a theme that has good readability of its fonts
  • Test your shortlisted theme thoroughly

A theme of any website is selected based on features and its purpose. However, we have created a list of well-built themes of 2019. Evaluate yourself if any of these is suitable for your business.

S No Theme Load time
1 Astra 1 second
2 Generate Press 1.3 second
3 Ocean WP 1.5 second

Clean your database

Clear Database Revisions
Clear Database Revisions

Website speed starts to decline with time. These are some of the reasons for this issue such as

  •  Increased number of Plugins
  •  The number of posts is increasing
  •  Spam Comments
  •  Revised posts piled up on your Website.

There are several other reasons as well. Google incorporates speed as a ranking factor in June 2018. Now, it is of utmost importance to meet this criterion in order to achieve a better place in search engine. The old school methodology to optimize database was

  • Login to your control panel
  • Find and select the database you want to optimize
  • Select the table
  • Optimize database

Technology innovation makes our life easier. Now we have automated Plugins that need to be installed. They do the rest for you to speed up site speed.

S No Plugin Name Active Installation
1 WP-Optimize 800,000+
2 WP Sweep 70,000+
3 Advance Database Cleaner 40,000+

Minify JavaScript and CSS Files

Minify JavaScript & CSS
Minify JavaScript & CSS

Minify is the terminology which refers to the technique used to eliminate non-essential characters from your code. It ultimately results in improved site speed. The right technique is to minify files only that are fetched by visitor browser. The less will be the size of those files the more quickly it will load. Normally these files include CSS, HTML and Javascript files. Experts argue that sometime minifying doesn’t create a distinct impact. Actually, it all depends on the scale of your website. Minifying is more beneficial for large scale websites as compared to a smaller one. However, you cannot neglect it. There are various factors as well that can be evaluated by Professional WordPress optimizer. WP inCare has created a list of top 3 tried and tested minifying Plugin.t will help you to minify your content.

S No WordPress Plugin Active Installation
1 Autoptimize 800,000+
2 Fast Velocity Minify 60,000+
3 Merge+Minify+Refresh 10,000+

Final Words

Applying these techniques will improve your site speed. We hope that this article will be beneficial to you. You can get our expert service as well for enhancing the performance of your WordPress site. We are giving professional services to our clients globally. Contact us today!! We are looking forward to your feedback. Write back to us. What you want to read related to WordPress, Web development or related niche. Your feedback helps us to further improve the quality of these blogs. Our team is available across all Social media channel for your assistance.

What we do Best

WordPress
Maintenance
you Need!

WordPress Updates

Security Checks

Daily Cloud Backups

Speed Optimization

Premium Plugins

Developer Consultation

2 thoughts on “Ultimate guide to Speed up WordPress site”

Leave a Reply to Wilbert Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *