A slow website would always have a high bounce rate and spam score. This is because today, the attention span of users has become very short. If your WordPress site takes more than three seconds to load, it will piss off the traffic hence the search engine. Slow load time can result in a bad DA score and badly affect your website’s position in the search results. If you are wondering how to speed up your slow website, you have landed on the right post. In this article, you will explore different tips and techniques that would improve your WordPress site’s speed and help you outrank your competition.
Still, thinking about why you should improve the speed of your website? Well, read on the different reasons you need to optimize the load time of your WordPress site!
- Good user experience is ensured if you speed up your site. No one likes a website that takes time to load.
- You need to optimize your website load time because it helps you lower your bounce rates.
- A high conversion rate can easily be achieved with the help of a fast website.
- You can make more revenue and get organic traffic if you have a speedy WordPress site.
- Fast loading speed also helps you achieve higher search ranking positions. Optimizing website speed is one of the leading SEO metrics, which is why you need to focus on it.
The slow loading speed of your WordPress website can be because of plenty of reasons. Still, here in this post, we are only to throw light on the actionable tips that would improve your site’s speed.
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13 Tips to improve the speed of a WordPress website!
Here we have collected some of the best tips that can help you improve the speed of your WordPress site without any hassle.
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Disable all auto-updates for installed themes
One of the common reasons for a slow WordPress website is your plugins are getting auto-updates without your knowledge. When a new theme update arrives, it always adds to the weight of your website. This is why we would urge you to disable all auto-updates. This way, you would get alerts when a new update comes, and you can manually update your site if you want to. The only drawback of disabling updates would slow down your admin dashboard. This problem can be avoided if you use digital plug-in managers for updates.
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Clean up all junk from the media library
A common reason your site can get heavy is if you forgot to clean up the junk files. Images can slow down your website as they contribute to its weight. If you keep on adding new images without getting rid of old ones, it will slow down your WordPress site. You can overcome this problem by simply cleaning the media library. This would free up space in your site’s database and would improve its speed. You can access the media library from the dashboard and delete any file you want without any restrictions.
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Reduce unnecessary redirects to your site
Redirects refer to the links that guide a browser from one URL to another. This process of redirecting the browser takes time which is why it slows down the page loading time. When you have added too many redirects to your site, it can ruin the user experience. Now, there is a possibility that you would not remember the redirects you have made in the past or the 404 errors on your site. You can overcome this problem by using digital tools to highlight all the redirects on your WordPress site. Once the unnecessary redirects are highlighted, you can easily delete them. Reducing the number of redirects can improve your site’s speed!
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Replace PHP codes with HTML where possible
PHP is undoubtedly vital for professional websites and eCommerce stores. Still, you must know that the downside of PHP codes in your WordPress site theme is increasing requests to the database. These requests can slow down the website. This is why most WordPress experts recommend that you avoid using PHP code. To speed up your site, you can easily replace the PHP code with HTML where it is possible.
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Optimize the database of your WordPress site
In your WordPress database, you will find all kinds of data may it be textual, visual or technical. You would find data that you no longer need. Useless information and data saved on your database will slow down your website. An unorganized database can be a reason for delayed requests on your site. You can do a manual clean-up regularly to optimize your site’s database, or you can also get database optimization tools or plugins for this purpose.
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Paginate comments under your blog posts
Another reason behind a slow WordPress website can be many replies under blog posts. If you manage a blog on WordPress, you need to understand that overwhelming comments can be annoying for your site. Having multiple replies and discussions on your blog posts can slow down your website’s speed and increase the load time. This is why experts recommend that you paginate content on your blog post. You can easily do it from the settings on your dashboard.
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Avoid using widgets and social buttons
WordPress websites can easily slow down if you add anything out of proportion. Just like adding unnecessary plugins can slow your site, in the same way using unnecessary widgets and social media buttons on your site will ruin the user experience. The more buttons and widgets you add to your web pages, the more date requests would increase on your site. You can improve the speed of your WordPress website by simply removing all extra buttons. Only use the widgets and plugins that are most important for your niche.
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Use HotLink Protection
HotLinking refers to the links that point directly towards the media content on your WordPress sites. Hotlinks are usually used for linking images, videos and other visual content. This negatively impacts your website as it slows down its speed. The HTTP requests are increased because of these kinds of links, so experts recommend that you use hotlink protection with the help of a .htaccess file!
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Discard all large PDF files and images on your site
If you have uploaded images or other files on your site in PDF format, you must know that it will have an extremely bad impact on your site’s speed and load time. PDF is a heavy format; still, rookie WordPress developers would always mistake using PDF rather than using optimized image formats. If your site has PDF images, you need to use PDF to png conversion tool. Online PDF to PNG converter can help you change your images to the right format. PNG images have a smaller size than PDF and, of course, better quality.
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Limit the number of blog posts on a page
If your blog site has hundreds of posts stored in its database, it doesn’t mean you have to show all of them on one page. Showing too many blog posts on a single page would slow down the site and ruin its authority and user experience. The solution to this problem is using experts and paginating unnecessary blog posts from the page.
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Compress the size of your images
Large-sized images are also one of the big reasons your site can get slow. If you feel like your images are slowing down your website, you can resolve this problem with two solutions. The first one is to convert png to jpg as the later format is smaller. The second option is to use an online image compressor tool to shrink down the size of the image. Trying either of these solutions and optimizing your website images would improve the speed and load time!
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Remove all videos that you are hosting on your site
WordPress is a very friendly platform. It simply allows you to upload and host videos from your local or cloud storage. This might look like an ideal option to you, but in reality, it is not good for your website’s speed. You can ruin your site’s performance because of these videos; moreover, you would also have to pay your WordPress hosting provider more fee for video bandwidth. The alternate solution to this problem is hosting videos from third parties like YouTube and daily motion. This can increase your site’s speed by more than ten times!
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Use a WordPress speed-optimizer theme
A simple solution to speed up your WordPress site is simply picking up the optimized themes for speed. Choose themes that are lower in size and good in performance. Doing so would help you decrease your website’s load time and its operating speed. There are many WordPress themes for speed, but the most popular one is Zakra.
These are some of the best tips that can help you speed up your WordPress website like a pro, sp stop stressing, and start optimizing your WordPress website.
