How to Speed-up Your WordPress Site
The importance of your site’s loading speed cannot be understated. Site speed is one of the leading factors of user experience and SEO. Therefore, if your WordPress site is running slow, you must know how to improve its speed. In this article, we will explore some of the ways you can optimize your WordPress site’s speed.
Choose the Right Web Hosting
Your web host stores all your WordPress site’s data. There are three types of WordPress hosting: shared, VPS, and dedicated. It’s essential to choose the right one, so your site will perform optimally
Shared hosting involves hosting your website on a server that’s shared by other websites. All the sites on the server share the resources of the physical server. As a result, the traffic of single or multiple sites on the server can impact your site’s performance. Therefore if you’re using shared hosting and your site is slow, you should upgrade to a different hosting type.
VPS hosting involves renting a virtual private server on a physical server. Like shared hosting, the server is divided up among multiple sites. However, unlike shared hosting, the other sites on the server will not affect your site because you are separated from them by a virtual partition and have your own resources. If you experience a steady stream of traffic under a thousand unique visitors a day, then VPS hosting is the option to provide you with fast WordPress hosting, resulting in a faster website.
If you experience over a thousand unique visitors per day, then the fastest WordPress hosting option is dedicated hosting. A dedicated server means that the entire physical server belongs to you and your site. With all the resources of an entire server at your disposal, your site loading speeds are guaranteed to be fast.
Use a WordPress Caching Plugin
WordPress sites are dynamic. This means that pages are built in real-time. Therefore to create your pages, WordPress has to run a process whereby they find the required information, put it all together, and then display it to the user. This process is time-consuming and can slow down your website, especially if you have a lot of people visiting at once. To prevent this process from slowing down your website, you can cache your pages. This will make your site speed up to 5x faster.
The caching process works by creating a copy of your page after the first load and then serving this “copy” to the site visitor rather than going through the whole page building process each time someone visits.
Also, Read: How does SEO Benefit your website in the long-term
Revise Images for Speed
Images are integral to your site’s content. They bring the text to life and engage users. In fact, researchers have found that using colored visuals makes people 80% more likely to engage with your content. Unfortunately, images can also affect site speed.
Before you upload any image to your WordPress site, you need to optimize it through an editing program. What you need to do is make sure your image is in a JPEG format. JPEGs are a compressed file format that decreases the image size. This will make it faster to load.
Utilize a CDN
A CDN or Content Delivery Network can help increase your page loading times. CDNs are a worldwide network of servers. CDNs are geographically positioned so that they will be closer to your users than regular servers. Each server consists of static files such as images, CSS, and JavaScript. They also cache content, further increasing the speed at which it gets delivered. When a user visits your website, they are served these static files from the server that is closest to them. The closer a user is to said server, the faster they will get these files.
Summary
The most important thing for increasing the speed of your website is choosing the appropriate hosting type. Once you’ve done that, you can further optimize your WordPress site’s speed by using a caching plugin, compressing image sizes, and using a CDN. If you do these things you will improve the speed of your site, enhancing its performance and ensuring a good user experience and better SEO.