How to Boost the Speed and Performance of Your WordPress Website?

No one would want to use a slow and steady website in the fast and speeding world. If you own a business established on WordPress, then you’ll need to speed up your WordPress for better and more efficient performance. 

The website speed can contribute massively to the user experience, demographics, and performance metrics improvements. Website speed is synonymous with a do-or-die situation for a business; it will either help you succeed or can often lead to utter failure. Slower websites affect the traffic. 

There is not one but many ways for WordPress Speed optimization. It might not be easy to find everything in one place, but we’ve got the job done for you with our exceptional services in custom WordPress development services for high standards. Here are the tips and tricks you need to know to boost the speed up WordPress performance. 

See Also: Migrating a WordPress website to AWS

Tips you must know to Speed up WordPress Website.

Speed and efficiency are the core of almost everything today. No one likes to wait if the website is too slow to load. 

Fun fact: First 5 seconds of the load time bring in the highest conversion rates and drop by 4.42% almost every second. 

Faster server, faster speed

A devoted server and quality web hosting are the roots of a fast-running WordPress website. Business owners often use cheap servers or shared hosting due to the low cost, but it can be a terrible idea once the website generates a good amount of traffic and popularity. 

As they are shared by several websites simultaneously, the server fails to provide even satisfactory speed during peak hours.

Hence, a dedicated VPS or managed hosting plan from a reputed provider might be a better option if you have a well-established website with great content and receive heavy traffic. They will handle the traffic much better and increase the traffic with reduced load time. 

Keep track of performance by running tests.

Before making an upgrade to the current performance, it is essential to know the stats of it in the present. No metric exists to sum up, the performance factors, as they can vary due to location, internet connection, caches, etc. 

The speed can vary due to content uploaded on the page. But to get the most accurate estimate, one can use tools like Website Grader to measure the performance.  

Delete unused plugins and maximize usage of caching plugin

Every plugin is like software installed on the website, which might affect the website’s speed, just like your laptop. Too many running simultaneously can affect the website’s load time, even if you are not using and allow them to run in the background. 

So, begin deleting plugins you would never want to use again, and check the site to ensure it continues to work smoothly.

Caching plugins are part of WordPress plugin development that help skip several steps while loading websites. If you do not use a caching plugin, the website will process and collect all the data from your database every time you access it. It will levy a heavy server load and reduce the site’s speed, making it very slow. So use a caching plugin to boost the speed and performance of the website and allow us to get WordPress Plugin development done for your website. 

Updates and Updates

All apps require updates regularly, isn’t it? Similarly, Website updates are a part of your WordPress administration life. Everything, from themes to plugins, needs to be updated for your site to be efficient and speedy.  Try to keep your WordPress updated almost constantly, and remember to test them before applying them on the live site. 

Latest PHP version usage

WordPress is based on the foundations of PHP programming language and is the scripture for all WordPress websites. PHP brings in regular updates to increase the efficiency and productivity of the website and decrease the current load time. Therefore, it is recommended to use the latest version of PHP at all times to maintain a constant speed. 

But be cautious with the updates, and ensure that the themes and plugins you are using are compatible with the latest version of PHP. Then only go ahead with the update.

The current latest version of PHP is PHP 7, which is 2x faster than the previous older versions. So they can significantly affect the website’s speed. It is advisable to use the latest version to boost the performance and speed of the website. 

Using CDN (content delivery network)

The loading speed differs depending on the location from where the site is being accessed. Using CDN allows for minimizing the load time for visitors from around the world. The distance can lag in content delivery if the hosting infrastructure is in a different part of the world than the access center. 

CDN allows the user to surf the webpage from the nearest location possible and keeps a Xerox of the website in various data centers in different places. 

Reduce, HTML, CSS, and JS

HTML, CSS, and Javascript are essential for running a WordPress site hassle-free. But if they lack optimization, they can lead to much lag. So it is advised to minify the HTML, CSS, and JS codes. 

We can ensure that they do not affect the website’s functioning in any manner but only reduce unnecessary codes by replacing the functions and variable names with short names.  They help reduce the amount of data transfer to make the files run faster and modify a website’s loading time. 

To perform the above, you can use WP Rocket, CSS Compressor, or Autoptimize. 

Set a limitation on comments per page

Attention to the blog posts or your website is always welcome, but thousands of comments can reduce the website’s speed. They are not the website content you want to display but the main content. Hence, break the comment section into separate pages and cut off the loading time. Not only that much, but it will also improvise the memory consumption and make the most of the performance.  

All in all, it is upto you how you want to optimize the speed and enhance the performance of your WordPress website. It is your responsibility to manage. We have sent in multiple strategies to speed up WordPress and satisfy the users with a fast and best user experience. 

If you adopt any of the steps mentioned above, you will see excellent results on the website and its performance. So, get working on WordPress speed optimization with us and avail more services like Website migration, sketch to WordPress, Figma to WordPress, Adobe XD to WordPress and more.