Most websites primarily run on WordPress websites in the online space. When visitors land on your website, it's essential to capture their attention and keep them engaged. A website needs to have a site-loading speed of lower than 2 seconds. If not, it will decrease user engagement and increase the bounce rate.
Without proper optimization, your site’s performance will negatively impact your site, which will get slower over time, leading to lower rankings and lower domain authority. Improving website performance can be challenging, especially considering the huge differences in devices, connections, browsers, and operating systems. Still, if your business relies on your website as the primary channel to reach customers, it will significantly impact your business's positive influence.
Here’s how you can improve your website’s overall performance.
- Run a diagnostic check of your website.
There are tools like GTMetrix and Google Pagespeed Insights where it analyzes your website on several parameters. These websites enable users to test the speed of both desktop and mobile devices and provide helpful optimization tips. Users will receive an overall score that assesses the speed of their sites and advice from removing unused code to images that could be tagged more efficiently. Highlighting the current pain points affecting your website health and much more.
2. Invest in a good WordPress hosting service
One of the easiest and most effective ways to improve website performance is choosing the right hosting partner for your needs. Research wisely and look for a plan having good customer service, server backup, and easy migration.
The most preferred solution is better known as Shared hosting, where the subscription fees are low as multiple websites are directly hosted on a single server. It is recommended in the initial stages as it has lower security concerns.
If you are choosing a managed WordPress hosting, it comes with a server architecture of a shared hosting clubbed with additional services and features.
The third type of hosting is a VPS WordPress hosting where you can work yourself on a virtual private server, recommended only for teams and people with experience.
3. Reduce page loading time
W-3 Total Cache is a popular plugin among website builders and the WordPress community. This advanced plugin improves website performance by dramatically reducing page load times through CDN integration. Create HTML files that are served directly from Apache without processing relatively heavy PHP scripts, which will help you dramatically improve the speed of your WordPress blog.
Whenever a user visits your site, your caching plugin will render a lighter HTML page instead of a heavier WordPress PHP script. This is precisely what page caching does, and it is one of the best ways to shorten page load time.
4. Choose the suitable theme
The theme will set the tone and set the first impression. It has to be engaging, subtle, and not overdone. Some themes are completely bloated and add to loading time, affecting website speed.
Choose a theme that has the right features and adds to the functionality and essence of the website. For example, if your WordPress theme includes a lot of built-in features as styles and effects, then you might consider switching to a faster loading theme.
5. Choose plugins wisely
You can also test how your current plugins affect your site's speed by deactivating them one by one in the Plugins section of the backend of your WordPress site and then running the PageSpeed test. This will show you the impact of the plugin on your site's speed, so you can make an informed decision that the plugin's functionality is worth slowing down. Installing the Plugin Performance Profiler and running a scan will reveal which plugins are slowing down your site.
Review each plugin and consider removing, replacing it with code, or looking for an alternative lightweight plugin. Then you can go to the list of inactive plugins and remove the ones you no longer need. Disabling and removing unneeded plugins is a significant way to improve performance. Apart from that, you should constantly update your plugins and themes, the next step for a fast website.
In Summary
The key to improving a website is optimized. Each element can be replaced or organized to better functionality and simplify the process. Optimize images and each webpage, if necessary, without hampering the quality. There are smart plugins that can automatically reduce the image size and raise flags if any page has a higher loading time.
Keep a regular strategic site monitoring to understand the site’s performance deeper. It will help you keep track of the progress and enable you to make smart data-driven decisions improving the user experience for the better.
