We know that WordPress is a widely used content management system on the web. You are also one of WordPress user, using WordPress for your site, but facing high load time for your site, due to slow page load of your WordPress. Here’s how we can check and improve our overall site speed.
Why Good site speed required.
Website load speed plays an important role in your website google search ranking as well as for great user experience. Google’s search algorithm includes your page load times as one of the many parameters while calculating PageRank.
Here’s why Google like good site speed
What do Bing experts say about site speed?
According to a report by the Microsoft Bing search team, a 2-second longer delay in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by 3.8%, increased lost revenue per user by 4.3%, and reduced clicks by 4.3%.
Let’s check and improve your Site speed.
To check your site speed, get help from these awesome tools.
- Webpagetest
- Gtmetrix
- Page speed tools by google
Once you have checked and find some issues with your site, now fix them.
Here are some other things which also need to check or do in terms of site speed improvements.
- Choose a good WordPress Hosting
Yes, this is the most important aspect of your site speed, that you choose a good WordPress hosting provider with good hardware and network availability.
Here’s our Guide on How to choose a Web Host
Now we also need some software or plugins to tweak the performance of your WordPress site.
- Use Caching
Via plugins:– For WordPress caching you can use plugins W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. These plugins will convert your WordPress posts as static files and these static files are then the server to Users to reduce server processing load. When combined with a system level page cache such as Varnish, this can be quite powerful.
Browser caching:– with browser caching, we’re explicitly instructing browsers to hang onto particular files for a specified period of time. When the file is needed again, the browser is to pull from its local cache instead of requesting it from the server again.
Server caching: – more complex but it is used in very high traffic sites, simplest solutions start with the server caching locally while more complex may use multiple caching servers (also known as reverse proxy servers) “in front” of web servers where the WordPress application is actually running. Adding an opcode cache like Alternative PHP Cache (APC) to your server will improve PHP’s performance by many times.
- Image Optimization
Images may slow down your WordPress if they are not optimized for speed.
How to know if your images are slowing your site down use Pingdom website speed test. This will tell you your overall load time and site size. The best practice is less than 3 seconds and smaller than 1mb
- WordPress database optimization
wp-optimize plugin for database cleanup and optimization without phpmyadmin.
We would also recommend the WP-DBManager plugin, which can schedule dates for database optimization.
- Minify HTML, CSS & Javascript All that blank space, comments, new line characters and anything redundant in your code that makes it easier on the eye without purpose is completely useless to a server and the IP that trying to reach out to your servers requesting your site.
Remove all this stuff with a free caching plugin and your site will be better off in terms of performance.
- Minimize the number of HTTP requests When someone visits your website, the corresponding files must be sent to the user’s browser. This includes CSS files, Javascript library references, and images. Having a high number of files requiring multiple server requests is not efficient at all. You can reduce this by combining JS scripts, HTML and CSS files together.
- Replace PHP With Static HTML PHP is great for making a website efficient and reducing the need to enter the same information multiple times. However, calling information through PHP uses up server resources and should be replaced with static HTML where it doesn’t save any time.
- GZIP Compression Large pages (which is what you could have if you’re creating high-quality content) are often 100kb and more. As a result, they’re bulky and slow to download. The best way to speed their load time is to zip them—a technique called compression.
Enabling gzip compression on your site will reduce the amount of data sent from your server to the visitor’s browsers, thus increasing the page-load speed.
- USE CDN Content delivery networks work by hosting your files across a large network of servers around the World. When a user visits CDNs hosted sites, CDNs provide them files from the server that is closest to them. Because the bandwidth is spread across so many different servers, it reduces the load on any single server and also protects your sites from DDoS attacks and traffic spikes, hosting your files or media on the content delivery network is one of the best ways to improve your site speed. CDN also saves up to 60% of total bandwidth consumption.
- Use Lazy Load For Text, Videos & Images