Do you have an online appearance of your brand? If yes! You would definitely want to offer your users a better experience. Website speed is a great part of your online business. It improves your user experience and comes up with the happy visitors online. Site speed is infact integrated as a huge part of Google’s search engine status. To discuss in short, a faster website can result in improved search rankings.
How to Measure Site Speed
Before actually getting into the website speed and its worth, it is important to know how site speed can be measured.
Well, measuring site speed is very simple and it is the first step that helps you measure your present performance. To do this simply, there are a lot of tools like:
Pagespeed tools
Apart from these tools, site speed can also be checked in depth within Google Analytics.
With this comes the query: How to Perk Up WordPress Site Speed?
As per studies, a site taking more than 5 seconds to open, needs immediate action for improvement. But the point is how to improve site speed. Well, here are five quick ways to do it efficiently.
Make Hosting Better
Website speed is something that needs to be taken very seriously and upgrading hosting plan in that case can be a quick heal. This is mainly true when you are on a shared hosting plan and your site is slowly growing into a website with higher traffic. A managed hosting provider which is particularly designed for WordPress like WP engine, will obviously assist you in achieving the required speed. Due to this WordPress specialization, managed hosting providers suggest security and support for the wordpress sites.
Delete Un-required Plugins
WordPress.org lists the extra plugins to be removed from the website so as to improve the site speed and its performance. The reason behind is very simple. More will be the number of plugins, more codes are to be loaded by the browser, which obviously slow down the performance. As an initial step or to check it out if the site speed is affected, delete un-required or excessive plugins from the platform.
Pick Up a Solid Theme or Framework
A website’s content and its looks are mainly based on its framework. Theme frameworks greatly decrease the development time and offer customization or functionality options. Additionally these frameworks come up with so many options that may not even be required. So this way it is important to choose a theme which is built on a lean and robust framework.
Make Use of caching Plugin
Caching can seriously alleviate site’s speed and related issues. A WordPress caching plugin design a static HTML of almost every page on your site. This actually stops visitors from making request to your website every time they land on which will automatically speed up your site. Then there are plenty of caching plugins accessible for wordPress which include WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, etc.
Make use of Content Delivery network
A content delivery network chairs your website images and files in variety of locations around the world so that the visitor approaching your website can retrieve the required or the most relevant copy of the searched content. This way Content Delivery Network (CDN) can work a great deal in boosting up your website’s performance. This works extremely well, when your site contains large media files having heavy traffic from various locations around the globe.
Optimize your Home Page to Load Quickly
This is one of the most common things that you can do to boost up your site’s speed. Make sure that your homepage loads down with a pace, which certainly is the first place people often come across.
Simple things to make your homepage better
- Decrease the number of posts on your page
- Display excerpts instead of complete posts
- Exclude inactive plugins and widgets that you feel are not required
- Reduce the number of posts on your page
As a whole, a focused and perfectly cleaned homepage design can help a great deal in not only making your site look good but load it with speed too.
Cleanup WordPress database
Loaded database literally serve as an obstacle in site operations. So, it is suggested to keep its size to a minimum and help in decreasing the backup size. This data clean up may include deleting spam, fake users, comments, unwanted plugins and the old drafts of your content.
With this, there is no end to the methods that can be used to make your wordpress site work faster. These strategies can work a great deal in bringing your site in user’s notice and build a brand name. Additionally, a user shall make it a point that a single change is made at one time so that it can be noticed what is working well and what’s not.