15 Ways to Speed up WordPress Website
A slow WordPress website will have far-reaching consequences for the performance of the site and the user experience. Slow speed will also be detrimental to your search engine optimisation efforts thus denying you an opportunity to have lots of free and targeted traffic to your sites. Presented here are fifteen ways you can use to enhance the speed of your WordPress Websites:
1) Host your website with a good host
Always choose reputable companies for hosting your websites since they can guarantee good speeds with very few downtimes. It might be expensive at the beginning, but it is worth the bargain.
2)Optimise the database
The other way for a WordPress web developer to improve the speeds of the sites it to have a well optimised database. This can be achieved automatically from phpMyAdmin.
3)Consider using content delivery networks
A content delivery network gives you the ability to distribute static content in multiple data centers across the internet. Whenever a request is made, the relevant content will be served by the servers geographically located closer to where the equest is made. CDN greatly reduces the load time of the website.
4) Use a lightweight theme
A lightweight theme, like the default WordPress theme, will enhance the loading speeds of the site. A “heavy” theme, on the other hand, will slow down the site leading to poor user experience.
5)Compress Javascript Files
Since javascript files are loaded in almost every page, they need to be compressed so that they don’t take much of the resources hence enhancing the loading speeds of the websites.
6)Fix all 404 Errors
404 HTTP Errors have the potential to lower website speeds. As a WordPress web designer, you should check that all pages are properly linked to avoid the generation of this error that will ultimately slow down the website
7)Remove Inactive Plugins
If there are installed plugins you are not using, don’t just disable them but instead, uninstall them to improve the website speeds.
8)Use updated WordPress version
As a WordPress web designer, you must always ensure that your sites run on the latest version of the platform. Other than enhancing the security of the site, the latest version also will improve on the functionalities that include the speeds of the site.
9)Reduce the number of HTTP request
When your website experiences lots of HTTP requests, the speeds are bound to go down. To avoid this, simply merge CSS files, javascript files and images in relevant data sprites to reduce the number of requests.
10)Optimise your images
Be sure to optimise all the site’s images for the web. You can use photo editing software to compress the images and also reduce their sizes before uploading to the website.
11)Do not allow Hotlinking
When you allow hotlinking in your website, you increase the server load, and this will ultimately reduce the load speeds of your WordPress website.
12)Split long posts into Multiple Pages
As WordPress web designer, you should always ensure that there are no longer pages in the website since this will only slow down things. If this is the case, then you need to split the content into multiple pages to facilitate speeding up the WordPress website.
13)Use Expires Header on Static Resources
With an Expires Header, the browsers won’t have to re-fetch any static content that had once been served thus reducing the taken by the pages to load.
14)Allow Caching
When caching is enabled on the website, the code won’t keep on generating the page each and every time a request is made, but will simply make available the cached copy thus reducing the load time
15Regularly scan the site for performance
It is imperative for every WordPress developer to scan the sites for performance on a regular basis. During such scans, you will discover the various culprits affecting the speeds of the website and know how well you can improve on them.
A lightweight theme, like the default WordPress theme, will enhance the loading speeds of the site. A “heavy” theme, on the other hand, will slow down the site leading to poor user experience.
5)Compress Javascript Files
Since javascript files are loaded in almost every page, they need to be compressed so that they don’t take much of the resources hence enhancing the loading speeds of the websites.
6)Fix all 404 Errors
404 HTTP Errors have the potential to lower website speeds. As a WordPress web designer, you should check that all pages are properly linked to avoid the generation of this error that will ultimately slow down the website
7)Remove Inactive Plugins
If there are installed plugins you are not using, don’t just disable them but instead, uninstall them to improve the website speeds.
8)Use updated WordPress version
As a WordPress web designer, you must always ensure that your sites run on the latest version of the platform. Other than enhancing the security of the site, the latest version also will improve on the functionalities that include the speeds of the site.
9)Reduce the number of HTTP request
When your website experiences lots of HTTP requests, the speeds are bound to go down. To avoid this, simply merge CSS files, javascript files and images in relevant data sprites to reduce the number of requests.
10)Optimise your images
Be sure to optimise all the site’s images for the web. You can use photo editing software to compress the images and also reduce their sizes before uploading to the website.
11)Do not allow Hotlinking
When you allow hotlinking in your website, you increase the server load, and this will ultimately reduce the load speeds of your WordPress website.
12)Split long posts into Multiple Pages
As WordPress web designer, you should always ensure that there are no longer pages in the website since this will only slow down things. If this is the case, then you need to split the content into multiple pages to facilitate speeding up the WordPress website.
13)Use Expires Header on Static Resources
With an Expires Header, the browsers won’t have to re-fetch any static content that had once been served thus reducing the taken by the pages to load.
14)Allow Caching
When caching is enabled on the website, the code won’t keep on generating the page each and every time a request is made, but will simply make available the cached copy thus reducing the load time
15Regularly scan the site for performance
It is imperative for every WordPress developer to scan the sites for performance on a regular basis. During such scans, you will discover the various culprits affecting the speeds of the website and know how well you can improve on them.