10 Ways to Improve the Speed of your WordPress Website
WordPress is currently the hot favorite platform for most web designers. If there is a platform they want to develop on, it would most certainly be WordPress. There is a reason for such love among developers. Most developers find this platform easy and seamless to integrate websites on. Secondly, maintaining websites on WordPress does not seem to be a major task either. Probably, this is the main reason why most people go after WordPress.
But, not every WordPress has a defined speed mechanism. Some sites load faster than the others. Have you ever wondered why your website is loading slowly? Remember slow speed won’t attract users, and if you want to give your users the perfect experience, then you will need to improve the speed of your website.
How can the speed of your website be enhanced or improved? A question that remains in your mind every time you see your website being loaded, and you patiently wait for it to get loaded.
Here are 10 quick fix ways to improve and enhance the speed of your WordPress website. Every wordpress app development should include these ways so that they can successfully build on the user interface.
Know the Plugins
Oh! This does not mean that you should be aware of the plugins on your system. This simply means you need to be aware of those plugins that are determined to slow your system down. There are some plugins that impact the speed of the website. Mostly social sharing plugins, which are obviously necessary, would be the ones impacting the speed of the website.
Instead of using plugins, embed the social sharing buttons and enhance the speed of your website.
Compressing the Site
Use Gzip when you are working with your WordPress website. As compressing can lower the size of your file, Gzip can lessen the size of your web page. Once that is done, the bandwidth is reduced owing to which the overall speed of your website is reduced too. The web page automatically unzips itself whenever any visitor comes to your website and displays the contents. Other times, the whole page is zipped.
Compressing the Images
Images can become a cause of concern when talking about the speed of your website. In order to fix the speed of your website, try to use compressed images. You can use the different plugins to compress the images. Remember to use the plugins that don’t impact speed of your website.
Inculcate Browser Caching
There are a lot of browser caching plugins available on WordPress. Install them to your website. Remember this whole caching technique is a little tricky, but if you get it right you can improve the speed of your website, and enhance user experience.WP Super Cache is an amazing plugin, one that every WordPress website should have.
Database Clearing
Another reason for lowered speed of website could be the database and the matter filled in. This place would require clearing every now and then. WordPress autosaves a lot of drafts, and this can occupy a lot of space on your database. Try clearing all the unnecessary drafts to make space for speed. The plugin that can support this task is the WP-Optimize. Get this plugin onto your website and get started
Minification of JavaScript & CSS Files
When you have too many JS and CSS files, you will need to engage in minification process. It is a bad idea to put all JS files together and all CSS files together. It can have a huge impact on the speed of your website. Better wordpress minify is an excellent plugin that will help you in the minification process and thus improve the speed of your website. The CSS and JS files will be enrolled into one file and you will see a considerable amount of reduction in the requests.
Pingbacks & Trackbacks
Does your post link to other blogs? In that case WordPress might just send them an alert every time your post pings or tracks back to these other blogs. This can eat up a lot of your speed. In order to reduce it, you will need to reduce these alerts. Turn these alerts off by going to settings>discussions
Specifications for Images
Sometimes a visitor browser tends to display your web page. But, without perfect instructions on the way the images should be set and dimensions settings, these browsers can take a longer while to display your web page. This can be harsh on your speed. So make sure you have set the image size and dimension while coding so that the speed is not affected.
CSS Sprites
A large image that integrates all the other small images is known as a sprite. This can be of considerable use if your website uses a lot of images. Using CSS sprites can reduce the impact of images on speed, and thus give out an incredible user experience as far as speed is concerned.
Use Keep Alive
Whenever the client requires downloading a file, they need to send permission to the server and this is where HTTP Keep Alive is most important. With this keep alive, the client can download multiple files at the same time without really impacting the speed of the website.
Jack Martin working for PremierTrainingCourses company at UK, a leading sales training courses provider company. He enjoys writing on topics which improve employees’ skill to achieve corporate goals.
