Speed is the one thing that affects most of the websites' users’ engagement, their search engine ranking, the traffic, and ultimately their business projection. Understanding the website’s requirements and learning to optimize the website’s speed is an essential skill and can come in handy for the website owner. Fortunately with the problem come a solution, in this case, a number of techniques that you can apply to your website. An easy solution would be to include third-party enterprises that offer WordPress website development services.
There are different kinds of websites and similarly different kinds of Optimization techniques supporting those websites. Therefore, in order to begin with optimization, you first need to understand your website type. Generally, small websites like static websites’ that just offer a piece of information require less time and skills, and medium to a large website that like a dynamic website or a website that’s having a subsequent amount of traffic might need the help of WordPress development services for website optimization.
For that reason, we’ve put together a list
of techniques that you can use to increase your websites’ speed. But before we
move forward with the list, let us first understand why we need to optimize our
WP platform?
Need for Speed Optimization
There are so many reasons what a slow website can damage. According to a study, the average engagement time of users has dropped from 13 seconds to 6 seconds. The more the internet speed increases, the more this time frame decreases. Moreover, the Search engine puts high-speed loading websites on top ranks w.r.t. slow websites.
Among all the users out there, eCommerce consumers are the most impatient. These users want the website to load within 3 seconds, otherwise, they’d move on to another platform. Therefore, if you are running an online business, you’d want to take some major actions to create a profitable business. Slow websites are the reason for lost conversions, low engagement, and even lesser retention.
So,
let us dive deeper into the techniques we can use to enhance the speed of our
WordPress website.
Top Methods to Improve your WP Website’s Speed
Better Hosting
The first step to enhance a website’s speed
is to confide in better hosting services. In the beginning, we all fell for
easy options offering cheap hosting services. However, these are not safe for
your website, when traffic increases, cheap hostings are not able to handle it.
Further, avoid using shared hosting services as well. For small websites or
beginners shared hosting might work but once you start getting enough traffic,
the shared hosting divides bandwidth among your websites, slowing down all at
once.
Updated WordPress Website
Keep your WordPress platform updated. WordPress has a large support community and it keeps on releasing security patches and upgrades that help in optimizing your website according to market standards, making your website SEO friendly. A newer version of HTML, PHP improves your website’s performance.
Running your website on an old version of
this platform can slow down the site as the new extensions made for the new version might not be compatible with the older WP version. Furthermore, after
upgrading, remember to update all of the extensions also to keep them up to
date with the WP version and maintain compatibility.
Responsive Theme
A lightweight Theme is important for your website as a lot of shiny and good-looking components like sliders, widgets might be appealing to the eye but the larger the number of components, the larger your website’s page is going to be. Eventually slowing down the website’s speed.
The best way to select a better website is
to go with the default WordPress theme. Another way is to look for highly
responsive themes or free, yet customizable themes. That way you get to include
the shiny components you want and keep the page lightweight.
Reduce Media Size
Media is one thing that takes up the most
bandwidth while loading a web page. Hence, media files contribute the most in
increasing the websites’ loading speed. Seek expert graphic designer’s help for
this task and optimize all your media files without affecting their quality.
If performing manual optimization go for
image optimization plugins available on the WordPress store that can help you
in proper image optimization. Some of them are WP Smush, Optimole, and more.
Wrapping Up
With the methods mentioned above, we had just scratched the surface on how to improve the WordPress-based website’s speed. However, one thing is clear, the more you do in lowering your site’s loading time, the more traffic you’ll generate. Moreover, it’ll improve your Search Engine’s ranking in the long run. Leave your suggestions in the comment, and let us know about the other methods that you’ve found successful.
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