Many website owners prefer creating their website/blog through the WordPress platform, the main reason behind this is that it is simple, and no technical skills are required. Once the backend setup is completed, all you have to do is add content as per your preferences.
As time passes, the website becomes rich with content, plugins, images, extensions, and other important aspects. WordPress provides the perfect framework through which you can enhance the reader experience.
One of the potential problems that might harm the functioning of your WordPress website is the slowing down of the site. If anyone finds the title of your website interesting and clicks on it and in case he/she has to wait for a lot of time to view the content, the user will get annoyed. The page load time is an extremely important factor from the point of view of the search engines as well.
Preferably, you must keep a watch on the page load time of your website, this can be done effectively through the ‘Google’s Page Speed Insights’ tool. Through this tool, you will be able to understand the areas of the website that need improvisation in terms of reducing load time.
Apart from that, you can follow some simple and efficient ways to speed up your WordPress website:
Optimizing The Images
An image is the most important aspect when it comes to enhancing the readability of your content. It is a fact that the image files are heavier in comparison to the text files. In case you have a WordPress website that comprises many images, you will definitely experience a slow loading time. For compressing the image size, WordPress provides a plugin called ‘WP-Smushlt’.
This plugin can be downloaded and installed for free. One of the major benefits of utilizing this plugin is that it reduces the file size of the website considerably and also ensures that the image quality is intact.
Using Caching Plugin – ‘Website Cache’
‘W3 Total Cache’ is an efficient website caching plugin for WordPress. It ensures that the website loads quickly. This plugin caches every part of your website pages through an optimized progressive rendering technique. With this plugin, you can enhance the user experience and improve the server performance as well.
Database Optimization
Database optimization is a crucial aspect of each and every website. There is a wide range of WordPress plugins available that help in optimizing the database; these include – WP-DPManager, WP-Optimize, and Revision Control.
Through these plugins, you can schedule database optimization and reduce spamming activities as well. A perfectly optimized database helps the web hosting server in responding to queries without any delay, thereby enhancing the overall website speed.
Deleting The Unwanted Plugins And Extensions
If any of the plugins or extensions are no longer in use for your WordPress website, then you must delete them right away. This is one of the factors that is overlooked by many website owners. This is a small thing but creates a great impact on the website load time.
Optimizing The Home Page
Just like any internal web page, there is a lot of traffic coming to your home page as well. Therefore, it is crucial to optimize the home page of your WordPress website.
Use the tips mentioned below to optimize the page load times of your index page:
- Display the post excerpts in place of the entire article as it will consume minimum space
- Limit the number of posts displayed on the home page
- In place of the full-size images, display the image thumbnails
- Use the ‘Optimize Website’ Feature Provided By cPanel
If you have hosted your website on a Linux hosting platform, you will get access to cPanel. This is the most efficient web hosting control panel that helps in monitoring the website and enhance the effectiveness of the website. By enabling the ‘Optimize Website’ feature, everything will be ‘gzipped’ when it is transmitted from the server to the web browser of the client.
Fast Web Hosting Server
The specification of the server on which your WordPress website is hosted makes a huge difference to the loading time. It is important to have your WordPress website hosted on a high-configuration server so that it loads fast and functions perfectly. You may consider a VPS hosting or a dedicated hosting platform that will perfectly support the functioning of your WordPress website.
With the simple techniques mentioned above, you can experience a great change in the page load times of your WordPress website. After all, everyone enjoys browsing a website that looks impressive and loads faster!