The accessibility and usability of a website are determined by its speed/performance. Nobody wants to visit a site that takes ages to load. A visitor attracts to a site that loads all the content, images and HTML files quickly.
In fact, a site’s speed is a crucial factor for SEO purposes. A faster website automatically increases the user-engagement, web traffic and boosts the overall productivity. According to the search engine platforms including WordPress, a two-second delay could decrease web traffic as well as the sale of a site.
Therefore, it becomes imperative for site owners to consider some WordPress optimization tricks that can help them reduce the load time of their site. Well, there are plenty of free and premium online tools such as Pingdom, GTmetrix, WebPageTest, and of course, Google PageSpeed Insights that can help you test the speed of your site.
But today, we will explore some of the simple yet effective tricks that will help you reduce the loading time of your site. So, let’s take a look:
“Back up your entire site, installed themes, plugins, html files and WordPress SQL database.”
1. Keep your WordPress site updated with the latest version
WordPress is a compelling CMS platform that rolls out its latest version on a regular basis. It keeps on improving its existing features, introducing new features and address issues related to the WordPress with every new release. It keeps on making efforts to improve the overall speed of websites.
So, make sure you run the latest version of WordPress into your site. In fact, you should upgrade your installed theme and plugins with their respective latest versions.
Note: You can download the latest version of WordPress 4.4.2 from https://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/
2. Use a Cache Plugin
A cache plugin is a must-have plugin that can drastically improve the performance of your WordPress site. It cache’s the frequently visited pages on your site and loads them quickly for the next visitor. The plugin produces HTML files that are severed without even touching a single piece of PHP coding.
If you are wondering for a high-powered cache plugin, then you should use a WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache plugin. These plugins provide an extensive range of page caching options that can improve the user experience of your site. It lets you increase the performance of your server, reduce the download times and offers reliable content delivery network (CDN) integration.
3. WordPress Database Optimization
WordPress database is a place where you store your site’s content. It includes pages, blog posts, images, comments, custom post types like links, portfolio items, and form entries. It also cumulates site settings, plugin settings as well as theme settings.
If you update your site on a regular basis, your database will automatically become heavy over time. A heavy database could slow down the speed of your site as your server would take longer to load the information from database tables. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize the database of your WP site.
You can remove unnecessary data from your database to improve its efficiency and speed of your site. You can also visit your CPanel and use PhpMyAdmin to optimize and repair the database tables.
You can optimize the affected tables by using the SQL command “OPTIMIZE TABLE”. For instance, you can optimize the wp_pages table by adding this SQL query:
OPTIMIZE TABLE ‘wp_pages’
Or else, you can make a use of WP-DB Manager Plugin to let you optimize, repair, backup, restore and database of your WordPress site.
4. Disable Hotlinking
Hotlinking is a situation when someone uses an inline link to display an image on their site that is hosted on your website.
For example: Suppose, I like an image on your site, and I want to use it on my site. If I use the URL of your image on my site, an image will be downloaded from your site every time when a visitor looks at my site. It means I am utilizing your bandwidth for the image. But if you disable hot linking, then I won’t be able to steal your bandwidth.
And for disabling the Hotlinking on your site, you need to embed the following line of code to your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?your-domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpe?g|png)$ - [F]
5. Flush Unused/Inactive Plugins
WordPress offers loads of plugins to extend the functionality of your site, without any coding skills. But most of us install too many plugins to explore new the ones. Using too many of plugins could slow down the speed of your site.
Instead of keeping inactive plugins, you should remove or deactivate them from your site. It will boost the performance as well as user experience of your WordPress site quickly and effortlessly.
6. Image optimization
Images can make your site more appealing and interactive. High-quality images can help you drive more visitors towards your site. But, embedding too many high-resolution or big-sized images could slash the speed of your site.
Thus, it is better to optimize all of your images before uploading them to the site. Use WP Smush plugin to optimize the size of your images with least quality loss. You can also use Photoshop, one of the best image editing software to optimize your images.
7. Compress your CSS and JS files
You can compress all your CSS and JS files to enable the browser to download them quickly. This will increase the overall speed of your WordPress site.
By enabling Gzip compression, you can minimize file sizes from 350+KB to less than 50 KB. It will be better if you compress all your JS files into one JS file and CSS files into a single file. It will save both your time and efforts, and you can manage your tasks efficiently.
8. Include Expiry date/time to static stuffs
You can add an expiry time to your static images as it will help you reduce the number of HTTP requests while loading other pages of your site. It will automatically trash the unused images from your website.
For adding expiration to static images, you need to embed the following line of code into your .htaccess file:
ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/gif A109002 ExpiresByType image/png A109002 ExpiresByType image/jpg A109002 ExpiresByType image/jpeg A109002
9. Host videos externally
Running a WordPress site with lots of high-quality videos could increase the loading time of your web pages. An enticing and engaging video can help you drive more traffic, but if your site loads the other pages of sites slowly, then visitors would immediately leave your site.
To avoid this scenario, host your videos using external services, such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc. It can help you in improving the performance of your site.
10. Adjustment in WordPress settings
Keeping thousands of posts on the homepage of your blog/site is one of the most idiotic things. You don’t even need to show the full post content on the homepage as it could downturn your site’s speed.
Instead of doing this, you just adjust your settings in the WP Dashboard under the Settings >Read panel. This will help you in loading your site faster.
Conclusion
All the points mentioned above in this post are effective and reliable. You should use these tricks to speed up your WordPress site. Or else, you can hire a professional web developer who can do all the heavy lifting for you and deliver you the performance drive website.
Guest article written by: Maggie Sawyer is a creative web developer at MarkupHQ Ltd., a leading psd to responsive wordpress with vast experience in web development & design. She provides Html theme conversion services with 100% client satisfaction guarantee.