Tips to Help Speed up Your WordPress Website
Do you want to speed up your WordPress website? Fast loading web pages will not only reduce the bounce rate but will also improve your search engine rankings and boost performance. But how exactly do you improve the load speed of your website? Here are a few useful tips you should use.
Install WordPress caching plugin
The first thing you should do to speed up your WordPress website is to install and activate a caching plugin. WordPress pages are built on the go each time someone visits a page or post. To build a page, WordPress needs to run a process of finding the necessary information and put it together before displaying it to the users. These steps can cause your website to take long to load. Caching plugins boost the load speed of your website by 2 to 5 times. They work by saving copies of your web page on the computer of a visitor so that the next time a visitor loads the page the cached version will be loaded.
Optimize images
The use of images can boost engagement and make visitors 80% more likely to read your post. On the flipside, images are great but if they are not optimized they can bloat your website. Prior to uploading an image, you need to use photo editing software to optimize it. Reduce the file sizes by compressing them. Images should also be saved only in PNG and JPEG formats. All in all, you must never compromise resolution.
Optimize background processes
The background processes are the scheduled WordPress tasks that run in the background. They include backups, cron jobs to publish scheduled posts, cron jobs to check for updates and search engines trying to fetch content. Tasks like scheduled posts and updates have little impact on the overall performance of your website. Other processes like excessive crawling by search engines and backup plugins will slow your site. You should set backups for times when there is low traffic and adjust the frequency of the backups and data that should be backed up. For crawls, keep an eye on crawls that end up in errors as those will slow you website.
Split comments and long posts into pages
Too many comments and long posts will take longer to load. As a result they will end up causing your website to be slow. Splitting the comments and long posts into pages will help boost the load speed.
Use themes and plugins that are optimized for speed
The themes and plugins you use must be optimized for speed. Check the reviews and ratings that a theme and plugin has prior to installing. Simpler themes will load faster than the complex ones that have too many moving parts.