This is the era of technology and the people’s attention spans are shrinking day by day. Therefore, the website load-time should be as quick as possible. Aside from increasing conversions, speed optimization can offer a lot of SEO benefits as well.
According to Google research studies, 53% of online searchers click away if a website fails to load within 3 seconds. And statistics show that websites take an average of 19 seconds to load on 3G devices. In this article, we are going to talk about five steps that you can take in order to optimize the speed of your WordPress website.
1. Opt for a reliable Web Host
First of all, you should have a solid foundation, which means you should go with a reliable web host. Having a WordPress website is not enough if you have a slow web host. Without a fast and reliable web hosting service, none of your tricks and configurations will work.
When you enter the URL of a website, your device downloads the web pages from the webserver. With a fast server, you can download the required pages much faster. Therefore, it is quite important to choose the best web host.
However, it is important to keep in mind that speed is not the only characteristic of the best web hosting company. Aside from speed, the service provider should also make sure that you will get the best customer support possible. If you have an eCommerce website, your website speed optimization is much more important.
Another important thing that you may want to keep in mind when hiring the services of a web host is to consider the website backup. This step is important if you want to get the most out of your speed optimization efforts. With a reliable backup system, you can rest assured that you can get your data back even if your server crashes. If you want to create a backup of your website, you can use the relevant plugins.
You can choose from a lot of web hosting service providers. However, if you are just getting started, you can manage a shared hosting service as well. In this case, your server will be shared with many other websites.
If you are on a budget, shared hosting is the best choice for you. However, as you get more and more traffic on your website, you may want to reserve more budget for a better web hosting service such as a dedicated host. You can also choose a private server as your website gets whose traffic. This is also important from the security perspective.
Just make sure you can afford the services of a dedicated web host. After all you don’t want to spend more than you can afford.
2. Opt for the right WordPress Theme
As far as website speed optimization is concerned, the theme is another important factor. If you choose the wrong theme, your website will take ages to load. This will have a negative impact on the performance of your website.
You may want to opt for those WordPress themes that are optimized for speed. It is important to know that good themes are designed for speed. At the same time, their design is quite simple, which is important for today’s businesses.
The good news is that it is easy to customize WordPress themes. The credit goes to the integration of many widgets and plugins. Aside from this, these themes are mobile responsive, which is important as far as ranking is concerned.
Today, most users browse the internet on their mobile devices, such as mobile phones, tablet PCs and other devices.
3. Try the Paid Caching Plugin: WP Rocket
With the right type of caching plugin, you can make your website load much faster. One of the most popular plugins is known as the WP rocket. This plugin offers a lot of features, such as GZIP compression, browser caching, CDN, Cloudflare compatibility and so on.
This plugin sends the required content to the server that is closest to the requester. And this helps reduce the load times. The reason is that this plugin reduces the distance between the user and the server that stores the required web page.
With the WP rocket, you can enjoy a lot of features, which means you don’t need to purchase extra plugins to achieve the same purpose. As a general rule, it is even better if you use fewer plugins.
If you are a developer and manage an agency that serves a lot of clients, it is better that you use their special white label option in order to get rid of the references to the plugin.
Although you need to pay for the plugin, it is worth every penny you spend on it. Therefore, you may want to try out this again. You will enjoy great results as far as speed is concerned.
4. Use a CDN
Your server location is another important factor that can have an impact on the loading time of your website. The closer your server is to the website visitor, the quicker will be the load times.
However, if your website attracts visitors from across the globe you can try out CDN, which is a popular content delivery network. With this system, you can speed up the page load times.
Actually, the CDN consists of many servers. This system stores the static files that your website is made up of. These files don’t change, unlike other files. Examples of these files include javaScript, CSS, and images.
Cloudflare is on the list of most popular tools that can be used for different websites. You can give a go to Cloudflare as well.
5. Make sure that You have the latest PHP Version
PHP 7.2 is the latest version of PHP. It was released a few years back, in November 2017. According to the WordPress requirements, your web host must support PHP 7.2 or higher, especially if you want to see your website function properly. Earlier, WordPress announced that websites must support at least PHP 7.0.
In short, if you want to improve the speed of your WordPress website, we suggest that you follow the 5 steps that you can find in this article.
