No one today has time
or patience to wait for the loading circle to finish its job. Everyone expects
the site to load as fast as the flash. Well, its no fantasy, it can be actually
made so with some optimization.
You may ask is page
loading speed that much of importance? Yes, its the speed of your website that
decides the future of it as it influences everything from traffic to bounce
rate to conversions, user satisfaction and, ultimately, profits. Not only this,
but a quick loading site also makes its way to Google's top ranking list as
well. Now you know why your website needs to have that lightning speed?
WordPress is one such
great platform that needs no introduction. Half of the world might be running a
WordPress site, such is its popularity. Unfortunately, its speed is its one
drawback. But don’t worry, since you got the fair idea of the need for WordPress speed
optimization, here’s how you can achieve it.
1. Select a good hosting partner
To save money, one of
the biggest mistakes site owners do is opting for shared hosting. Yes, it comes
with unlimited page views, but the cost of it is a slow loading site. Hence,
the first step to WordPress optimization
is to avoid nodding yes to shared hosting. Don't fall for cheap offers because
hosting is one of those areas where you get what you pay for and that should
not be risked.
A managed WordPress
hosting is something you must adapt if haven't yet. It will make your site run
on a server specially optimized for WordPress and you don’t have to worry about
any of the technical stuff that runs the website.
2. Stay up-to-date
WordPress releases
updates with some improvements, bugfixes, new features, and often improved
speed. Make sure to keep an eye on it and update your WordPress and its tools
updated at all times. Be it a plugin, a theme, or a new patch, test each update
on a WordPress staging site before applying it on a live site.
3. Make use of an effective caching plugin
There are countless
WordPress plugins and all are obviously quite useful, but some of the best ones
fall under the caching category because they drastically improve page loading
time and are free and easy to use. But, if you have to pick one then you must
go for W3 Total Cache. It has many updated features
you need and is very easy to install.
A caching plugin
stores the final view of your site for any future visitors which means your
WordPress site doesn't have to generate it for every following person viewing
your site. This data can include HTML, JS and CSS code, images, fonts and Flash
files.
4. Optimize whatever you can
Since we are talking
about WordPress optimization,
of course, you need to optimise something right?
Optimize your images,
home page and WordPress database. Why? Media files like very large images and
videos will significantly slow your WordPress site down. Hence, it is important
to compress media files. Now doing it individually can be time-consuming, better
use WP Compress the amazing, free plugin called WP-SmushIt
which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are
uploading them without the need of installing it.
The homepage is the
face of your website. If it can impress any visitor, at first sight, its a win.
Therefore, you must make your homepage load faster. For that, you must do the
following;
●
Instead of full posts, show
excerpts
●
Display around 5-7 number of posts
on the page
●
Remove unnecessary sharing widgets
from the home page
●
Discard inactive plugins and
widgets that you don’t need any more
●
Keep it minimal! Readers come for
content, not 8,000 widgets on the homepage
●
Have a clean and focused homepage
design
Database maintenance
is something you must do regularly because your WordPress site and its database
are prone to accumulate temporary disk space and unused data from uninstalled
plugins, post revisions and other culprits. To optimise it, you can simply use
the WP-Optimize plugin or WP-DB Manager plugin or any other whichever suits you
best.
Are you ready to speed up yours?
There are too many
hacks to optimise your WordPress, these were just a few important ones we
mentioned. Try and let us know the difference you observed and if you need a
professional WordPress speed
optimization service, you know
how to reach out to us.
More information click
on www.orainfotech.com
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