WordPress is a reliable platform, however, its weakness is it can get slow sometimes. Without taking precautions, you might get a website that is of no use. This is not only frustrating for the visitors visiting your website again and again but there are also the chances that you might lose customers and subscribers.

Why does the speed of the WordPress website matter?

When any visitor lands up on your website, you only got few seconds to get their attention so that they could be convinced and hang for a longer time.

• You might get sleepless nights

It has been found in the research that even a delay by 2 seconds of page responsiveness can reduce the satisfaction of a user by 4%, reduced clicks by 4.4%, and increased revenue lost per user by 4.5%.

If your website is taking a lot of time to load, many people will be gone by the time you even know. Not only this, Google has now included the site speed in its ranking algorithm. In other words, the speed of your website affects SEO, in case your website is slow; you are missing a lot of visitors because of impatience and reduced rankings in all the leading search engines.

How to fix it and speed up WordPress?

Are you ready to say goodbye to slow-loading WordPress websites? Read on to find out how it can be done.

• Solid theme/framework works the best

It might be a surprise for you, but the theme that was in 2019 is quite speedy and lightweight. This is because the guts are simple; compare them with the bloated frameworks that have different features that will never be used, slowing your website to a crawl.

Some of the frameworks that can be used in WordPress website development will not slow down with custom edits or excess plugins. The theme needs to be changed and avoid site loading issues.

• Select a good hosting provider

While starting, a sharing host looks like you are bargaining. It takes another cost: downtime frequently and slow site speed at the time when traffic is high.

If you are planning to publish something popular, it’s a disadvantage for you if your WordPress website runs on shared hosting. If your site goes down after investing in something big is enough to get those gray hairs and feel stressed. Make sure not to be a victim, and invest in the right hosting instead.

Various website hosting services offer the best customer service, which is essential in hosting. Head on to the homepage of professionals and you’ll be amazed to know that you did.

• Use a CDN

All the big blogs use this tool, and if online marketing is your area using WordPress, you might not be surprised to know that the famous blogs are using CDN’s.

If you would like to know about CDN, it takes all your static files which are on the website (Javascript, images, and CSS, etc.) and visitors can download it in no time.

Go with the network delivering content that can easily be used and come at a reasonable price.

• Use an effective caching plugin

No doubt, WordPress plugins work the best, but some of them are under-catching, as they improve the page loading time drastically, and the best thing is, they can be used for free on WordPress.org and easily.

Some of the plugins comprise all the features and can be installed and used easily. You just need to do the installation and activate it, and the page load faster as elements are considered cached.

• Do the homepage optimization so that loading takes place quickly

This is not only the important thing but a few simple things that can be done to make sure that loading doesn’t take much time, which is no doubt essential for your website because visitors will land there often.

Things to include are:

• Reduce the page posts
• Show only a description and not the full post
• Remove inactive widgets and plugins that are of no use
• Remove the sharing widgets from the homepage that are not necessary
• Keep the content minimal. Readers only want to read that, not the unnecessary widgets which are on the website.

Overall, a focused and clean design of the homepage will not only help the page to look well, but it will load quicker too. You can ask for recommendations from WordPress website maintenance services.

• Do the optimization of images

Some of the image optimizers will reduce the file size of an image drastically, while not compromising the quality. However, if you do this yourself, it might take a lot of time.

There are various free plugin available that does this with all the images automatically when you upload them. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t install it.

• Disable leeching and hot linking options of content

It is considered a bandwidth “theft.” It takes place when a direct link of other websites to the pictures on your website from their articles makes your server load increasingly higher.

This might add up as more people “scrape” your site or posts become more famous, as a must-do while creating customized images for your website regularly.

• Do the optimization of WordPress database

Various plugins are available that helps to manage one simple task: optimize your database (post revisions, spam, tables, drafts, etc.) to reduce their overhead. Some other plugins also help in scheduling dates to optimize data.

• Gravatar images need to be adjusted

You’ll go through it on the website that Gravatar image is set to nothing. The choice is not aesthetic but it can be done because page loading gets improved by having nothing where there normally would be a Gravatar logo or any other thing.

Various blogs go way beyond disabling them on the website, and for any other person. You can either do anything; you just need to know that it will benefit the speed of your website if the default image is set to a blank space instead of the default image.

• Add the expires header to static resources

An expires header lets you specify a time in the future so that any browser doesn’t have to fetch the static content again like javascript, CSS file, images, etc. With reliable WordPress website development, you can cut down the loading time significantly for the users who regularly visit your website.

• LazyLoad can be added to the images

It is the procedure where images can only be seen above the fold loading, then, when the visitor scrolls down, other images start to load, when others can view them.

The loading process will be increased which is a benefit but also bandwidth will also be saved where fewer data will load for visitors who don’t go down. Some of the plugins let you do this automatically.

Speed is essential to make the website successful. It influences conversions, bounce rate, search rankings, and more. Even some seconds make a lot of difference. You can take help from WordPress website maintenance services. Speed isn’t everything; the goal is to create a website of high quality in the best way possible.