This is the age of technology and people’s attention spans are diminishing day by day. Therefore, the loading time of the website should be as fast as possible. In addition to increasing conversions, speed optimization can also offer many SEO benefits.
According to Google research studies, 53% of online search engines click if a website doesn’t load within 3 seconds. And statistics show that websites take an average of 19 seconds to load on 3G devices. In this article, we are going to talk about five steps you can take to optimize the speed of your WordPress website.
1. Opt for a reliable web server
First of all, you need to have a solid foundation, which means you have to go for a reliable web host. Having a WordPress website is not enough if you have a slow web server. Without a fast and reliable web host, none of your tricks and settings will work.
When you enter the URL of a website, your device downloads the web pages from the web server. With a fast server, you can download the required pages much faster. Therefore, it is very important to choose the best web host.
However, it is important to note that speed is not the only characteristic of the best web hosting company. In addition to speed, the service provider must also ensure that you get the best possible customer support. If you have an e-commerce website, optimizing your website speed is much more important.
Another important thing that you may want to consider when hiring the services of a web host is to consider website backup. This step is important if you want to get the most out of your speed optimization efforts. With a reliable backup system, you can be sure that you can recover your data even if your server fails. If you want to create a backup of your website, you can use the corresponding plugins.
You can choose from a large number of web hosting service providers. However, if you are just starting out, you can also manage a shared hosting service. In this case, your server will be shared with many other websites.
If you are on a budget, shared hosting is the best option for you. However, as you get more and more traffic to your website, you may want to set aside more budget for a better web host, such as a dedicated host. You can also choose a private server since your website receives traffic from whom. This is also important from a security perspective.
Just make sure you can afford the services of a dedicated web host. After all, you don’t want to spend more than you can afford.
2. Choose the right WordPress theme
When it comes to optimizing website speed, the theme is another important factor. If you choose the wrong theme, it will take years for your website to load. This will have a negative impact on the performance of your website.
You may want to go for those WordPress themes that are optimized for speed. It is important to know that good themes are designed to be fast. At the same time, its design is quite simple, which is important for today’s businesses.
The good news is that customizing WordPress themes is easy. The merit is the integration of many widgets and plugins. Apart from this, these themes are mobile responsive, which is important when it comes to ranking.
Today, most of the users surf the internet on their mobile devices such as mobile phones, tablets and other devices.
3. Try the paid caching plugin: WP Rocket
With the right kind of caching plugin, you can make your website load much faster. One of the most popular plugins is known as the WP rocket. This plugin offers many features such as GZIP compression, browser caching, CDN, Cloudflare support, etc.
This plugin sends the required content to the server closest to the requester. And this helps reduce loading times. The reason is that this plugin reduces the distance between the user and the server that stores the required web page.
With the WP rocket, you can enjoy many functions, which means that you do not need to buy additional plugins to achieve the same purpose. As a general rule of thumb, it’s even better if you use fewer plugins.
If you are a developer and you run an agency serving a lot of clients, you’d better use their special white label option to get rid of references to the plugin.
Although you have to pay for the plugin, it is worth every penny you spend on it. Therefore, you may want to try again. You will enjoy great results when it comes to speed.
4. Use a CDN
The location of your server is another important factor that can have an impact on the load time of your website. The closer your server is to the website visitor, the faster the load times.
However, if your website attracts visitors from all over the world, you can try CDN, which is a popular content distribution network. With this system, you can speed up page load times.
Actually, the CDN consists of many servers. This system stores the static files that make up your website. These files do not change, unlike other files. Examples of these files include JavaScript, CSS, and images.
Cloudflare is on the list of most popular tools that can be used for different websites. You can also try Cloudflare.
5. make sure you have the latest version of PHP
PHP 7.2 is the latest version of PHP. It was released a few years ago, in November 2017. According to WordPress requirements, your web server must be compatible with PHP 7.2 or higher, especially if you want your website to function properly. Previously, WordPress announced that websites must support at least PHP 7.0.
In short, if you want to improve the speed of your WordPress website, we suggest you follow the 5 steps that you can find in this article.