The loading speed of your WordPress websites is a crucial aspect that impacts the overall SEO results. The fact that a number of users are most likely to restrict the use of websites that take more than 3 seconds to load emphasizes on the development of sites that load quickly.
In case, you have not done much for your websites to load easily, even the exceptional CMS, i.e. WordPress cannot do much about it.
There are a number of techniques apt for increasing the speed of your WordPress websites. It includes the use of plugins designed for the same purpose and practicing some of the SEO techniques.
Why should websites have faster loading speed?
Following are the reasons to speed up your websites:
- Google favors fast-loading websites
- Faster loading websites rank easily over the web
- Websites that load easily carry higher chances of conversion
- It offers a friendly user experience to the visitors
Now that much has been talked about the benefits with a faster loading WordPress website, here is an extended note on the tips that would help you in the efforts.
The role of a good web hosting service provider
Web hosting is a crucial factor to create successful websites. Choosing the best services depending upon the type of websites to be hosted, you can choose from free, shared, dedicated, and VPS to manage the site extremely well. In the current scenario, the shared hosting services are gaining all the attention with unlimited bandwidth, domains, space, etc.
Reducing the JS and CSS files
Reducing the CSS and JS files is minimizing the number of these files. After you minimize the number of files that are no longer beneficial, the site loading speed improves that ultimately benefits in the overall SEO ranking of the websites. The task is easy to be accomplished manually as well as with the use of plugins.
Choosing to replace PHP with HTML Tags
The approach is just wonderful to trim down the site loading speed. HTML tags load easily and search engines crawl easiest on them. Thus, there are better chances of getting higher rankings. Getting higher web ranking is the ultimate requirement of every website. Thus, with this very reason, it is recommended to opt for this suggestion.
Compressing the image size
Images add to the size of a given web page, thus decreasing the site loading speed. The solution lies in compressing the image size without compromising on the quality. Choosing a plugin for this requirement is the best approach that could harvest the best results for you. Plugins will compress images with no damage to the image quality.
Putting the inter-blog communication off
It is a default setting as an effect of which similar WordPress posts interact with each other that are geared with trackbacks and pinbags. Each time a blog will be mentioned from your site, it is going to notify the site as well. It thus automatically updates the data on the post. Turning off the link will help in inactivating the setting that will generate a lot of work on your WordPress website.
Schedule expiration to static items
Adding expiration to the static items is good as it will minimize the HTTP requests in case other pages will be loaded on the site. Additionally, it will help the specific web page to load much faster. Pages that load fast have the capacity to retain the visitors for a longer time, thus exceeding the conversion rate of websites a bit more.
External video hosting
External video hosting is recommended to those websites that are not having super-fast web servers. Hosting the videos externally will reduce the loading time of the website; thus, keep the server clean. You can host the related video on channels like YouTube for reducing the space on the website.
Using a CDN
The speed of websites differs for visitors from different zones. However, using an ideal CDN or content delivery network will help in keeping the speed of the websites uniform for all the visitors even from different zones. CDN works on the notion of fetching the web pages from the nearest location possible.
Inactivate irrelevant plugins
Uninstalling the deactivated plugins will reduce a tremendous amount of junk files from the web server. This practice is additionally going to increase the space for further data backup. Thus, never accumulates such an unnecessary data, it is only going to add futile load on the websites.
Frequent websites updates
The ever-growing WordPress community keeps on adding the latest recommendation to enrich the related features. There are hundreds of plugins and themes that are showcased over the official WordPress page, which can be used for updating the sites for including robust features. More to it, updating your sites with new posts is also recommended.
Adjusting settings frequently
You need to be smart when updating your WordPress settings. There is no point in displaying a lengthy content on your home page. A small para with “continue reading” at the bottom of the home page is a good practice to reduce the loading time of your WordPress website’s home page.
Manage the use of plugins
There are lots of plugins that can be used for accomplishing diverse tasks related to managing the WordPress websites. It is true that plugins are available; however, you need to use them ideally to get the most out of them. The services of experts can also be hired for the same.
These techniques to improve the speed of your WordPress websites are going to be equally beneficial for providing a fabulous exposure to the websites over the web and helping the users get an excellent browsing experience. Hence, try including some of them.
