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How to Increase Your WordPress Page Speed (5 Steps to Improve Your Site Speed)

Sep 6, 2023

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Slow site loading times could harm your business. Social media and a constant barrage of information have diminished the attention span of humans, meaning users lose interest quicker than ever before.

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If your website takes too lengthy to load, potential customers may simply click away.

It is good to know that there are effective strategies to improve the speed of your WordPress website's performance. Utilizing plugins, and following the good practices will make your website load faster and keep the ever-changing visitors on your page.

In this article this guide, we'll discuss five ways you can improve the speed of your WordPress speed. Also, we'll look at how slowing down your website can be and why quick loading times are so critical. Let's begin!

What Slows Down Your WordPress website's performance? (And Why Speed is Important)

The time it takes to load your website is how long it takes your site to fully display the content. It could be comprised of images or videos as well as text-based components.

The elements most likely to slow your website are:

  • Pictures
  • Videos
  • Slow plugins
  • Lack of caching
  • External scripts

This penalizes slow sites and pushes them further down the results page, making it harder for customers to find your site.

There is a cost-free tool like that of the IsItWP Speed Test to assess your WordPress website's performance.

Once you know your base line, it is time to start making tweaks to improve the loading time. It is also possible to utilize this tool to perform tests during the update process and determine what methods work best for your site.

What can you do to improve your WordPress Website's Speed (5 Easy Ways)

Once you've realized the significance of the WordPress site's speed is, we'll take a look some simple ways you can reduce your site's loading time.

1. Choose the right theme and add-ons.

Themes and plugins are key parts of WordPress websites. They are the primary components. But, poorly-designed themes and plugins could slow down your site significantly.

In selecting a new plugin or theme for your site, it is important to

  • Review user reviews and reviews. This can give you a good idea for how the plugin or theme is performing for different users.
  • Check if the plugin or theme has been recently updated. Tools that receive frequent updates from their creators are more stable and likely to be better optimized.
  • It is possible to test the staging site's performance before and after adding the new tool, to see the extent of any reductions.

2. Make Your Images

For reducing the impact of your media files, you can consider using an image optimization tool like the ShortPixel plug-in:

This plugin can be integrated with your WordPress site. It enables you to optimize pictures of all file types, including PNG as well as JPEG. It is very user-friendly, and you can compress all existing pictures on your site in a single click.

You may use ShortPixel as a ShortPixel plugin to optimize images using media > bulk ShortPixel > Start Optimizing:

The tool for bulk optimization can make all of the images from your WordPress library at once.

There is another option to consider using "lazy loading". This setting prevents your site from displaying images until the user scrolls down and reaches the desired images. This helps to speed up loading times for the first time.

You can allow lazy loading using a plugin like Smush:

Once you have installed the plugin, all you have to do is to go to Smush > Lazy Load > Activate:

After you have activated lazy loading, you can alter the settings to suit your needs, such as media types, exclusions, and the script's placement. Smush is also an excellent choice to compress and shrink images if you don't use ShortPixel.

3. Use a Caching Plugin (or Host with built-in Caching)

Caching is a vital procedure to help your website run faster. It makes and saves copies of your site in a location called a cache. It's so that your whole website does not have to be reloaded with each new visitor. The server can retrieve these stored site information for new users, so it's much quicker to load.

One of the easiest methods to cache your website is to use the plugin WP Super Cache. It makes use of a range of techniques, such as simple static files designed for common users, and "super-cached" static file that are designed for experienced users.

The WordPress Super Cache to store your site's information through settings > Super Cache > Caching on:

On this dashboard, you can change your cache settings by navigating to the Advancedtab. You can select the users who get cached content, what long the caches are able to last, and whether you want to enable expert cache delivery.

Its integrated caching is among the top available, which makes it the most efficient WordPress web host available.

4. Use an Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers spread across the globe. Each of them stores a cache of your site's data as well as when a visitor comes to your website it will be served the content from the CDN which is the closest one to their location. So your website will load a lot more quickly because there is less geographical distance.

There are many CDN choices available, such as Cloudflare. It is possible to sign up for a paid account and start making use of this top CDN to get your website more quickly to users.

5. Use Excerpts

If your site has blogs, you'll probably want to showcase your blog posts. However, displaying the blog's entire content can slow down your website's speed. Instead, look into displaying excerpts from the content on your landing pages.

As an example, you'll notice on the blog's homepage that it does not display blog the entire blog posts. The page displays a couple of paragraphs from each, and enables the user to select the headline to go through the remainder:

Depending on your theme, it is possible to alter your settings to display excerpts by navigating to the Settings menu > Reading for each post in a field that you want to include a summary:

After that, you are able to modify the excerpts from newly published posts by going to Posts > Add New. Within this page it is possible to click Post > Excerpt:

In this section, you are able to write a custom excerpt that can be displayed instead of the whole post. You can also insert excerpts into your existing posts.

Conclusion

A slow-loading website could be disastrous for your business. If your customers click away they could be missing out on opportunities for conversions. Thus, enhancing your WordPress website's performance is one of the most vital aspects you can accomplish.

To recap, these are a few ways you can boost your WordPress performance:

  1. Reducing the size of your image files by using the ShortPixel software Consider lazy loading.
  2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare to reduce loading time.
  3. Use post excerpts to increase loading speed.

Do you have any questions about how to improve your WordPress website's speed? Tell us about it in the section of comments below!

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