One of the most common problems that lead to bad user experience is the slow website loading time.
In this mobile age, users are expecting more advanced and blazingly fast loading websites. And, if your site takes a considerable amount of time to load, it will turn away your visitors. Certainly, the increasing bounce rate will further impact your search ranks. Therefore, if your WordPress website is not optimized to load instantly, you will surely miss a good amount of your business.
Fortunately, you can enhance your website performance and optimize its loading speed by taking a few effective measures and techniques into consideration. To help you make your website load faster, I have distilled some resourceful practices.
Let's uncover the tips, implementing which will rev up your site loading speed.
1. An Ideal Hosting Plan Is Inevitable
The foremost thing to consider cautiously while developing a website that can highly impact your website performance is the hosting plan that your website is using. Make sure that your server is capable enough to efficiently handle the processes related to MySQL commands and HTTP requests.
You can implement a suitable tool to scour the efficacy and speed offered by your server. And analyze the response time of other similar websites that lie in your niche. This will help you determine your site performance with respect to your competitors.
However, it has to be said that even if you have a worthy hosting company, but your hosting plan is not up to the mark, the performance bottlenecks will be created. For instance, the Shared Hosting Plan can result in slow page loads. Thus, it is better to scrutinize your website needs and seek a hosting plan that can offer sufficient RAM, speedy CPU, and most importantly, it must be capable of efficiently handling high traffic. One of the best WordPress web hosting providers is WP Engine. They offer a great backup functionality as well as provide good security.
2. Use a Fast WordPress Theme
Any design that exhibits rich graphics and poor code will surely increase your web page weight. The more the size of your themes, the more will be the loading time.
For this reason, it is advisable to choose a theme that is lightweight and optimized to deliver a prolific performance. And since, most of the designers optimize the demo of their themes by implementing CDN (Content Delivery Networks) and caching, it is no more easy to analyze the performance of a theme unless you have used it yourself.
3. Amend Your Home Page to Load Expeditiously
This is surely not the only way, but a small effort that can help you speed up your website loading. The significance of a home page can't be gainsaid. It is often the landing page of a website and most of the traffic straight away lands on the home page of a site. Thus, it is imperative to ensure its prolific performance. Here are some of the useful tips to boost the Home Page.
- Instead of showcasing the complete posts on the home page, you can display only their excerpts. This will make your page uncluttered and well organized.
- It is recommended to eradicate the extraneous themes and plugins.
- Don't make your home page over crowded with a plethora of posts. You can rather choose to display only a few numbers of items on the page.
- With a clean and minimal home page, you can enhance its UI design while making it load rapidly.
4. Keep a Check on The Count of Post Revisions Stored
If you are familiar with WordPress, you might know that WordPress saves each revision of a post to drafts. This certainly clutters the back-end and degrades the performance. Once the post is published, you will hardly need those revisions. Thus, it barely makes any sense to save indefinite revisions of a post. You can choose a suitable plugin, like Revision Control, to keep the post revisions as minimum as possible say 3 or 4. This is so because in case of any mistake, you will have some backup in your hand.
5. Use Optimized Images
Embedding bulky images on your site can dramatically impact the loading speed of your page. Fortunately, there are several solutions available out there that can help one to reduce the image size without compromising with the image quality. You may choose to install a suitable plugin, like WP Smush, from the WP repository. It will automatically optimize the images while they are uploaded so you won't need to go an extra mile for it.
Final Thought
You can analyze the loading speed of your website by using any of the available services, like Google Page Speed Insights. While offering the loading speed and complete file size of your site, these services will also provide some worthy tips. For more advanced tips, I hope the aforementioned pro tips will help you deliver an outstanding UX by expediting the loading speed and overall performance of your WordPress website.
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