If I had a WordPress site, I would often think about how to speed up my WordPress site. There are several techniques to speed up your WordPress site.
In the present world of digitalization, speed and efficiency are very important. If a website doesn’t work fast, there may be some issues with the traffic and bottom line. Therefore, web developers and experts think about speeding up their websites most of the time. This case is also very common for WordPress sites. WordPress site experts worldwide are working relentlessly for speed optimization to boost their site performance and ensure a good user experience.
Importance of WordPress Site Speed
Users always get frustrated while using a slow-loading website. A slow WordPress website causes a poor user experience, and developers have to avoid this if they want to sustain their business. There are various tools for measuring WordPress site speeds.
However, a lack of speed of a site can hamper the SEO ranking of the site. Site speed is a top-ranking factor for both mobile and desktop results in Google. Google will also use Core Web Vitals with speed metrics for determining SEO rankings. When there are many strong sites for any competitive niche, site speed is very important to maintain a good SEO ranking.
Slow site speed also increases bounce rates. The bounce rate of a site indicates the percentage of visitors navigating away from that site after visiting just one page. A high bounce rate isn’t good for any site. According to Pingdom, if the loading time for a page increases from 2 seconds to 5 seconds, the bounce rate also increases from 6% to 38%. Another factor of site speed is the conversion rate.
The conversion rate of a site is the percentage of visitors completing their desired actions on that site. Akamai has found that the conversion rate goes down by 7% due to a loading delay of just 100 milliseconds.
Increasing WordPress Site Speed
There are several techniques to increase the speed of a WordPress site. Google suggests that it’s better to keep loading times within three seconds. Experts need to detect the reasons for the slow speeds of their sites and take action according to these.
Updating The WordPress Site Regularly
WordPress goes through updates frequently because it’s a properly maintained open source project. There are new features and fixing of bugs and security issues with each update. The plugins and theme of your WordPress may also get updated regularly. So, website owners should update the latest versions of their WordPress site, plugins, and theme.
Cleaning Up The Media Library
On your site, there may be images that are no longer in use. You can remove unused media to free up your space. Media Cleaner is a plugin that is good for disposing of unused media. Also, you can do the cleaning up manually by going to ‘Add Media,’ then to ‘Media Library,’ and then to ‘Unattached.’ You can delete unused files from there.
Cleaning Up The Database
WordPress databases accumulate clutter if site owners don’t check their databases. These bloats can reduce site speeds. However, you can ensure fast loading by cleaning up your database regularly.
For example, post revisions can occupy extra space in the database, so limiting unnecessary post revisions is better. You can clean up your database manually by using phpMyAdmin. Installing plugins can be a more convenient way for database cleanup.
Background Process Optimization
Background processes run in your WordPress site’s background with a fixed schedule. Background processes, such as too much crawling by search engines, backup plugins, etc. can reduce site speed.
In the case of backup plugins, it’s essential to run the WordPress backup plugin while the traffic is low on your site. It’s also necessary to adjust the frequency of both backups and data needing to be backed up. However, you should check the Google Search console for your crawl reports to control excessive crawling.
Splitting Long Posts into Pages
Many readers love to read long and in-depth posts. Long posts often stay in high ranks in search engines. However, a problem with long posts is that these posts can slow down sites. It’s better to split up long posts into many pages. There’s built-in functionality in WordPress for splitting posts.
For splitting a post into pages, you need to apply the < !–nextpage– > tag in the post as many times as you want to split. This strategy is also applicable for comment sections. In the case of too many comments in posts, you can prevent slowing down your site by splitting your comment section into pages.
Using Excerpts on Archives and Homepages
In the default setting, WordPress shows each article’s full content on homepages and archives. Therefore, you will experience slow loading of your homepage, tags, categories, etc. Also, users may not view actual articles if these pages show full articles, resulting in reductions of page-views.
So, it’s better to set the website to show excerpts in place of the full content so that loading times don’t slow down. You can go to the ‘Settings’ option, select ‘Reading,’ and then select ‘Summary’ in the option ‘For each article in a feed, show.’
Use of Content Delivery Networks
Your site speed may slow down due to your web hosting servers’ location. A visitor will experience a faster loading time if the web hosting company is in his country, but a visitor from a different country will probably experience a slower loading time.
A solution to this problem is using a Content Delivery Network or CDN. A CDN has many servers worldwide, and every server stores static files for making up your website. If you have a CDN, a user visiting your website will get served from the closest server with these static files.
There are many other tactics to speed up WordPress sites, such as not uploading video or audio files directly, using lazy loading if required, fixing SSL/HTTPS problems without plugins, reducing database calls, disabling content hotlinking and leeching, using DNS level site firewall, etc.
These are the major techniques to maintain the speed of WordPress sites efficiently. Experts should keep in their minds these techniques to handle site speed-related issues.
