WordPress speed optimization is key. Increasing your WordPress website speed directly impacts SEO, user experience, conversion rates, and Google rankings. If your website needs a speed boost, you’ve come to the right place.
According to increasily.com, cutting down the loading time to about 2 seconds or less can increase conversion rates by 74%, and 90% say that slow-loading websites or pages are the main reason why they would leave a website.
There are several reasons why your website is slow. The most common reasons are hosting platforms, caching, not optimizing pictures or videos, and other reasons we will look at.
Here, we have a list of the main reasons why your website is slow and best practices that will boost your WordPress website.
1. Have a caching WordPress plugin
When someone revisits your website or refreshes your website, the server does not need to reload the webpage from your server. More like, your webpage gets stored to reduce the loading time when visitor reloads or revisits your webpage or website. This increases your website’s load speed.
One of the best free caching plugins is WP fast cache with over 1 million active installs. It has a premium version, but the free version will do the job if your budget is limited.
WP fast cash has more than 1 million active users on WordPress and more than 3,000 and 5-star ratings. There is no complicated method of installing this plugin. By just activating it without doing anything, it does the rest for you.
2. Having too many plugins
We all love plugins, especially free plugins. Plugins help us improve our website without any coding, but having too many plugins on one website will cause our website to slow down.
Having a maximum of 10 plugins or less. This can help your website to reduce the loading time. Deactivate or delete all the unnecessary plugins that you don’t need or plugins that you don’t use
3. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
A CDN allows the quick transfer of information across the internet. It reduces the distance of the content of your website, traveling from your server to the user’s computer.
A CDN will take your website and deploy it to local servers. This will increase the loading time of your website because users will just connect to a local server to find your information instead of fetching information directly from your server or your hosting platform.
4. Optimizing your images
This is one of the biggest reasons for an increase in page loading speed and it is common for beginners. Having large images on your website pages will slow it down it will increase the overall page size of each page.
The recommended size of a picture is 100kbs or less (not more than 150kbs).
tinyjpg.com is one of the best websites to compress an image or multiple images at once. This website can compress an image without reducing the quality. On the other hand, many websites will reduce the size of an image but will also reduce the quality of the image.
If you have a lot of images on your website, it can be difficult for you to reduce the size of each image. Install the WordPress plugin called wp smush. Without doing any work, this plugin will optimize images on your website without you doing any work.
WP smush has a feature called lazy load. Lazy load is when other contents load when the user is scrolling doing a webpage. The benefit of the lazy load is that initial load time is reduced.
For example, if you have a heavy file at the bottom of the page, it will not load upfront. It will start to load as the user is scrolling at the bottom and getting close to it.
5. Do not upload any Audio/video files.
Uploading a video directly to your website will drastically slow your website. It is recommended that if you want a video on your website, always upload it to websites like YouTube, and imbed the video.
Uploading a video directly to your website will drastically slow your website. It is recommended that if you want a video on your website, always upload it to websites like YouTube, and imbed the video.
Uploading videos on your website will increase the cost of bandwidth and the overall of your cost to host your site.
6. Use a lite theme for your website
They’re a lot of great themes out there. Most of which are very heavy. Having a lite theme on your website is the first step to improve your website loading speed.
One of the best free themes for websites on WordPress is Blocksy. Blocksy is one of the fast-loading themes for WordPress. It has a free version and has a premium version. If you are on a limited budget, you do not need to upgrade to the premium version. The free version works perfectly.
The best alternative to Blocksy is Astra. Astra is the most popular lite WordPress theme and has more than 500,000 active users.
7. Reduce the number of redirects on your website
Yes, this is true. If you have a large number of redirects on a single webpage, it will alternatively increase the loading time of that particular web page.
When you have a lot of redirects on your website, your website makes more HTTP requests. This will slow down your website if you have a lot of redirects on a single webpage. Reduce the number of redirects you have on your webpage as much as you can.
Conclusion
Websites are slow because of different reasons, but these are the main reasons why most websites slow down. If you use all the methods on your website, surely the loading time of your WordPress website will reduce.
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