You may have already heard WordPress speed is important for SEO. Google has continued to emphasize page speed in their algorithm.
If you’re not optimizing your website for better WordPress speed, you’re probably losing organic traffic from search engines.
Besides SEO, WordPress speed has an impact on driving sales and revenue to your table. Take a look at a few stats that illustrate the point.
- Conversion rates will be reduced by 7% if a site is delayed for a second.
- 40% abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- 79% of web shoppers would never return to a website to if they found any trouble with the website performance.
In this post, I’ll explain various tricks to boost the page speed of your WordPress website.
1. Testing With Other Tools
First things first.
If you’re looking to optimize your WordPress site for boosting page speed, you’ll need to conduct speed tests on it. Speed testing helps you figure out what actually slows down your website. It will also give essential clues about what you should focus on in order to reduce the loading time.
Use a service like Pingdom to track uptime, downtime and the performance of your website.
2. Install P3 Plugin To Boost WordPress Performance
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) is a free plugin that helps you analyze what causes WordPress performance drops. If you’re using too many plugins on your website, it will likely negatively impact WordPress performance.
With the P3 plugin, you can analyze the execution time of each WordPress plugin. You can figure out how much they impact the total load time and database queries per visit.
These details tell you which plugins you should optimize in order to increase WordPress speed.
3. Optimize Images
For most websites, images account for most of the downloaded bytes. A few ways to optimize images for boosting page speed are…
Image compression: Compress unnecessarily large images with the WPSmush plugin
Lazy load: Are you using too many images on a web page? If so, one of the easiest ways to boost WordPress speed is to load each image only when they are visible to your visitors.
Use CSS: Try using CSS instead of images wherever possible.
4. Use a CDN
Content delivery network (CDN) is a network of multiple servers distributed around the world to boost page speed.
CDN helps you cache static content and files on your site. The content is distributed to your website visitor based on the geographical location they reside in. It is served to your website visitor through the server that is closest to them.
If you’re looking for a reliable CDN service, MaxCDN could be one of the best choices for you.
5. Use A Cache Plugin
Cache plugins boost WordPress speed by generating static files from a dynamic WordPress website. Each time when your visitor sends a request to view a web page, rather than processing a comparatively heavier dynamic PHP file, your web server serves the cache file, which improves WordPress performance.
If you’re looking for a free WordPress cache plugin, take a look at W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.
6. Split Your Long Posts
Splitting your long form articles into multiple pages is another great way to reduce loading time. Aside from reducing the load time, this strategy will help to generate more page views, and thereby generate more revenue if you’re monetizing your website with ads.
All you need to do is to insert <!––nextpage––> tag in your article to split your posts into different pages.
7. Disable Hotlinking
Hotlinking is the process of stealing your bandwidth by serving your hosted images on other websites. This practice is commonly followed by content scrapers, which increases your server requests, which in turns degrading your WordPress speed.
Simply copy the below snippet on your .htacess file. Make sure you replace the domain name inside the snippet before saving it.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?your-domain-name [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
8. Choose A Reliable Web Host
If you’re hosting your site on a cheap shared hosting, everything you do to speed up your site will simply fail. This can be true especially if you’re experiencing a tremendous growth in terms of number of visitors.
In such a case, you might want to consider using a managed WordPress hosting to reduce downtimes like WPEngine.
9. Use Speed Optimized WordPress Themes And Plugins
Using too many interactive plugins can be great for viewing. But what if it takes too much time to load the web page? Chances are your website visitors will leave your site with frustration.
The problem is that not only are you losing a potential customer, but you’re also sabotaging your brand authority by creating a negative image in your customer’s mind.
This is why choosing a theme that is optimized for speed is essential for your business.
Apart from choosing a speed optimized WordPress theme, it is better to use lightweight plugins for your site.
For example, most social sharing plugins can be resource intensive. If you’re looking for a speed optimized plugin, Floating Social Bar could be a niche choice.
10. Combine Files To Reduce HTTP Requests
One of the problems with using too many plugins on your site is that they add their own JavaScript and
CSS files on yours site. Because each additional file is an HTTP request, it consumes too much bandwidth, which in turn degrades WordPress speed.
One of the most effective ways to reduce HTTP requests is to combine all those JS and CSS files into one single file.
11. Code Minification
Did you know that removing unnecessary white space and line breaks on your files will contribute towards speeding up the WordPress site?
This approach of reducing the file size by removing unnecessary elements is known as code minification.
12. Implement Google AMP
Google AMP is aimed at speeding up mobile rendering experience while browsing the open web. The basic idea is to dramatically boost page speed by serving web pages using an additional, light-weight stripped down version of your website.
Install the official WordPress AMP plugin on your site for implementing AMP. If you are curious and want to learn more about improving website speed and customer journey, hop over to these guys for more valuable sources of information for your future conquests!
What are your favorite WordPress tricks to boost page speed? Share your thoughts with us by commenting below.
