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Are you also looking for some of the best tips to boost up your WordPress speed? If yes, then you have docked at the right place. You might be facing several issues with your website, for instance, taking a long time to load, the presence of broken links, lack of SEO optimization, the cluttered home page, and more. These are some common problems that may affect your loading speed. But, don’t worry! In this article, you will learn the top best strategies to increase the speed and performance of your WordPress. 

Before moving forward, let us introduce you why speed is essential to your website? 

Dive into the article to know more about it. 

What Is The Importance Of Speed To Your Website? 

How long do you wait for any website to load? It’s a natural process that we generally don’t wait for long if the website does not get loaded in one go. Instead, we prefer to switch to another website, right? 

The speed of your website causes severe effects like user experience, sales, search rankings, and conversion. Check out the list given below to discern critical points of the importance of speed to your website. 

• Your website’s speed is the first impression on the user.
• Show up websites like conversions
• Effects your google rank
• It affects engagement 

 The research was done by a strange loop which says that Amazon, Google, and other significant sites when they get delayed for even 1 second, can steer to a 7% conversion and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. 

How to inspect the speed of your WordPress website? 

It is essential to check your website’s speed because you might often feel that your website is working right as it doesn’t work slow on your computer. But, it’s your biggest mistake. Therefore, you are in the habit of frequently visiting your website. Thus modern websites such as chrome stock your website in the cache and automatically prefetch as you start typing the address of the website and your websites load rapidly. Whereas a regular user may not amass the same experience. Now, you are aware of why you should check your website’s speed. So let’s check it out; how to do it? 

There are countless free online tools available to check your website speed for which you can opt, such as: 

• KeyCDN Website Speed Test
• Google Page Insights 
• GTmetrix
• Webpage Test
• Dotcom-monitor

After running a test, you might be wondering what a decent speed of the website is? It is 2 seconds, and a good page will load in under 2 seconds.

Ways to Increase the WordPress speed 

1. Selecting a Good Hosting Service 

The primary and foremost step in maintaining the WordPress website speed is selecting and signing up with a good quality hosting service provider. However, you do not have to spend much on the hosting services; instead, you can opt for the cheap offers available on the web. 

Yet, it is suggested that irrespective of the cost, try and avoid a shared hosting service. This is because shared service providers do not offer any visibility or control over those websites with whom you are sharing, and that may affect your site’s performance. 

Thus, based on the cost one can afford and the nature of business, mainly two service providers are shortlisted. 

• Virtual Private Server- VPN is specialized for smaller businesses or start-ups, providing speed and ease of use at a reasonable cost.
• Managed to host service- Managed hosting services are specialized for WP sites to increase WordPress website speed and ensure that the sites load as fast as possible. 

2. Using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

The use of content delivery networks is meant for those sites where the users aren’t located close to where your servers are hosted. CDN speeds up the website by hosting the assets in different locations across the globe. 

CDN allows you to store your files at multiple locations so that the users can be served with static data from a server close to their area. There are many CDNs available that offer lifetime free CDN.

Some of the best CDNs are Cloudflare, Jetpack, and Incapsula.

3. Not hosting videos on the server

The servers allow the user to upload videos to the WordPress site directly, and WP renders the video in an HTML5 player. However, when you post the video, the provider might charge you for the bandwidth because, generally, the servers do not permit hosting videos or bandwidth-intense files. Thus, to reduce the cost and increase the speed of your site, you can use free video hosting services like YouTbue or DailyMotion. 

Know which WordPress hosting is best for you?

4. Decreasing the number of server requests

The visitor’s browser submits many requests to your server, and these requests are termed server requests. Requests can be in multiple forms – images, style sheets, JavaScript files, etc. When the server requests are higher in number, it takes a longer time for the requests to be fulfilled. So, it is suggested that the server requests shall be kept at a minimum. There are several ways to that, including:-

• Decreasing the number of posts on each page
• Use a Plugin Performance Profiler to uninstall and remove the lower-performing plugins.
• Lower down similar elements and reduce the number of images on the website pages.
• Make use of the Lazy Load WordPress Plugin, and it will load only the images that your visitor will see.
• Get rid of unnecessary plugins.

5. Enable Caching

WordPress creates an HTML version of your website as a rule of process and then serves it up to the browser. Now, rather than going through the lengthy process of creating an HTML version of your website at each server request, visitors can be immediately presented with the saved copy whenever a request is received. This process is called caching. Caching enables faster loading of the pages. Caching just requires assistance from your host service provider for implementation. For using this feature, a large variety of plug-ins and tools for WordPress are available. Some of these are WP super cache and W3 total cache. 

6. Minify the files

Once you are done reducing the number of files to the minimum, the next step is to ensure that the existing files are of the smallest size possible. This process of reducing the size of files is called minification. It clears the unnecessary occupied space and makes it easy to view. Some of the best tools for the process of minification are:

• GULP
• W3 Total Cache
• Tech-savvy

7. Optimizing Images and Other Media

Almost every website today consists of images and media. Thus it is suggested to ensure that they can be downloaded in the minimum of time through optimization or image compression. Generally, the file size of any raw image is in the range of a few MBs. So, when there are multiple images, it can negatively impact the loading time of pages and the visitor’s overall experience. 

Thus, to reduce the file size without affecting the quality, you can use tools like TinyPng and WP Smush. To optimize the images, an additional is also available before using the website manually. However, this works only for static images because this is to be done only once. However, if you have to compress the pictures dynamically, it will be a better idea to use a cloud image service. 

8. You should keep your site updated!

You should keep updating to the latest version of your website site, theme, and plugins. Each update will offer new features and fix security issues and bugs. Not updating your website regularly can slow down your speed, unreliable, and make you susceptible to security threats. 

Conclusion

Hopefully, the article was informative and valuable to read. The article has provided you with in-depth information about the importance of speed to your website, why it is crucial to check your website’s speed, and which apps you can probably use for the same. After reading this article, you’ll be able to figure out quickly whether your website is working correctly or not. If you haven’t analyzed the WordPress speed yet, don’t bet on it. Hurry up! And try improving your WordPress website speed with the help of the given points. 

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