05 Jun 10 Ways To Speed Up Your WordPress Site in 2021
Your site speed is very important for both ranking on Google and keeping your visitors happy and satisfied. Luckily, there are certain things you can do to reduce the size of your pages or posts and speed up your site. Just continue reading and find out how to make your site faster than ever.
Below you can find some useful tips to speed up your WordPress website:
- Reduce Image Sizes
If you want to speed up your site you have three options when it comes to images: remove unneeded images, decrease the number of images on any post, or Smush them. So, if you still want to have tons of images and keep the old ones, your best choice would be the third one. Just go to Yahoo and find the Smush it service, upload your images, and they would be automatically reduced in size while still keeping their quality.
- Clean Your Code
Most of the WordPress sites include at least one unnecessary coding line in their theme files or style sheet. Chopping out such unneeded codes can really make a remarkable difference in how fast your site loads. Just go through the style sheet, make sure that there isn’t something that’s currently being used, and go to the CSS Compressor and clean that space. Then, repeat the same thing with the other theme files (page.php, index.php, single.php, etc.).
- Change Your Design
Similar to the first one, vectors and images make the site eye-catching, yet they may be the slowest ones to load. On the other hand, sticking to CSS and CSS 3 as much as possible can result in some stunning designs without any needs of Photoshop. And, is that giant background image really necessary? Can you replace it with some nice-looking color? Of course, you can. So, try asking yourself such questions, and re-think your design. This will help you find ways to reduce the layout size of your website.
- Make Content Your Priority
When you’re blogging, you need to re-think your use of images over content. Why? First, images take up a lot more memory space than a long article; hence they take longer time to load. And, second, good-quality content is crucial when it comes to ranking on Google. Just stop adding images to every single headline and think about writing some useful and powerful content. A thousand words say a thousand words, image not always!
- Re-think Your Cheap Host
The hosting service you choose may have a huge impact on how fast your site loads. Cheap host means slow loading. Therefore, if you truly want to have a better and faster hosting provider, you should think about spending a little extra money. This will result in fast loading and satisfied visitors that will come back to your website, for sure.
- Cache Your Pages
Every time a page is loading, it first retrieves the needed data from the WP database. This process can really slow down your site especially when you’re making tons of requests to your database. So, in order to make your site load as fast as possible, you should have a ‘cached’ version (.html) of your website. You can do this by using the Hyper Cache plugin, or some other WordPress caching plugin.
- Cut Down on Scripts
One more thing you can do to speed up your WordPress site is limit scripts. Using as little scripts as possible will significantly reduce the time it takes your site to load. If you use the Tweetmeme script and then add the recent tweets, share on Facebook, the Digg button, or other scripts, your site will take a long time to load. Thus, use the ones that are unnecessary, and remove the others.
- Optimize Your WP Database
As we’ve discussed earlier, making calls to the database whenever you load a page can really slow down your site. The solution to this problem was to create a cached version of your website. However, that page or post must be loaded once before creating a cache. And if you optimize your database you will speed up your non-cached posts or pages.
- Limit Your Excerpts
If you want to display your entire posts on the homepage or category pages, you should think twice since it slows down your site. Alternatively, use smaller excerpts which will not only reduce loading time, but also improve SEO. All you need to do is use the <?php the_excerpt(); ?> template tag and type a short description in the excerpt box in the WP admin when creating a post.
- Remove Unnecessary Plugins
Last but not least, get rid of any plugin that you’re not currently using. Their own CSS files and codes inserted in your header or footer template tags take a lot of space and make more requests to your WP database. Thus, reduce the size of your site to the very last kilobyte by removing any unneeded plugins and keep the ones that you currently use.
You might also like : 4 Awesome WordPress Caching Plugins for 2019
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