6 Tips To Speed-Up Your WordPress Performance

Site performance is a crucial factor today. People are ready to abandon a website if it doesn’t load within a few seconds.

Low website speed means less traffic, high bounce rate, and low conversion. Speed is essential not just for the user retention, but also for the health of SEO.

If you are wondering what are different ways to speed-up the performance of your website, then this post is for you:

1. Use a Caching Plug-in

If your website has Javascript, CSS, and static images that don’t really change, you can use browser-side caching for that purpose. This way, every time a user visits your website, it will load quicker than it did the first time around.

Caching stores some parts of your website that will always load. This helps reduce the time taken for the server to load the website. Of course, this technique is not going to work on the first time visitors. This is for the return visitors and those who have visited some pages of your website already.

A popular caching plug-in is W3 Total Cache designed for the WordPress based websites. You might experience a boost in the website’s performance by 10 times if you can configure it fully.

2. Go with image compression

If your website houses many heavy images, it can take forever to load the website. But, don’t worry because there are several tools that can help compress images so they are quick to load.
One such tool is WP Smush. It strips the metadata from the JPEG images and also removes colors that are not in use.

Another excellent tool is Tiny PNG. This also removes unused colors. If your website has many images, you can go with lazy loading with Lazy Load plugin. The purpose of this plug-in is to make sure that the images are only loaded above the fold when a new visitor visits your website.

3. Optimize Database Tables

By optimizing the database tables, you can free up a lot of space so that the database can run smoothly. You can optimize the database manually with either a plug-in or manually with phpMyadmin.

With WP-DB manager you can repair, backup, restore, and optimize your database. For database cleaning-up and optimization, you can use WP-Optimize. You can also remove post revisions, un-approved comments and other items in the trash.

4. Reduce the number of HTTP requests

Every time a user visits a website, the browser downloads various parts of the page such as images, scripts, style sheets, etc.

To load these elements, your browser makes HTTP requests – one for every element. Therefore, the more elements you have on your web page, the same number of HTTP requests are made to load those elements.

In order to remove the number of HTTP requests, you need to first find out how many requests your website is currently making.

If you are accessing the site in Google Chrome, you can find out the number of HTTP requests by using Developer Tools.

You can reduce the number of requests to fasten-up the speed of your site. For that, find out which files are unnecessary.

5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

This is probably the commonest and the most popular method used by majority people when it comes to speeding up the performance of a WordPress website. A CDN is basically a network of servers. What CDN does is basically make clones of a website’s cached copy and store it on different servers which are spread around the globe.

The idea is to load the cached version of the website from the nearest server to a user’s location instead of accessing everything from the main data center. This way the website loads faster.

6. Go with quality hosting company

This is not exactly a method, but yes, your choice of hosting company will dictate how fast your website loads. If you go with a free plan, your users may have a hard time accessing the contents of the website. Therefore, make sure to find fast and reliable web hosting, just go through some reviews and find best web hosting just for you.

Conclusion

There are literally countless ways in which you can optimize the speed and performance of your website. You can try out a combination of different techniques to find out which ones worked best in speeding-up the performance.