Nowadays the WordPress platform is very popular for blogging and business websites. If a wordpress website is not properly set up, then it does not offer good performance. Sometimes the loading speed of the wordpress website decreases over time.
Website speed always matters to keep visitors engaged with your business. Visitors are impatient, if your website taking too long to load, they will left and try another website. It is also a Search Engine ranking factor. To have a good search engine rank you always need a fast loading website.
Here are some tips you can follow to get the minimum loading time and tremendous speed in your slow website.
Use fast loading wordpress themes
Before choosing a wordpress theme, always check following points:
PageSpeed Score : What is the Pagespeed Score of theme. You can check by using Google’s Pagespeed Insight Tools. It will show you how slow or fast your site is.
No. on Requests : Every theme used multiple external CSS, JS, Images, Fonts etc. These external references load in multiple round-trips. In this period your browser wait to show web page. So, use theme that has minimum external references.
Minified JS and CSS : A good theme should have minified versions of CSS and JS. It will save bandwidth and minimize loading time.
Lazyload Feature : WordPress theme should have feature to defer off-screen images. This feature generally known as Lazyloading. It helps to prevent downloading below the fold images. These images will be download while user scrolling the page.
Avoid Unnecessary Plugins
WordPress Plugins make extra burden on your webserver. If you are using multiple plugins, it will slow down your website. Use necessary plugins only.
Optimize Images
Image Size : Normally viewing width of an article image is under 640px in most of the themes. If you are uploading images more than 640px width, It is wastage of users bandwidth.
Image quality : Image quality also matters, High quality images have bigger file size. So, Optimize your image also for quality. You can use online tools line tinyJpg, tinyPng etc to compress image quality.
WebServer Side Optimization
Keep Server Response Time Low
Response time of a web server depends on hardware and software configuration. Monitor your webserver performance time to time for TTFB (Time to First Byte). Many on-line tools are available to check TTFB. If your server response time is high, change your hosting provider immediately.
Enable GZip Compression
Your content can be compressed up to 30-70% using gzip compression. This is a webserver feature and needs to enable at server side. In cPanel hosting, search for Optimize Website option and enable compression for desired websites. It can be done by .htaccess file also using mod_deflate.
Use PHP Accelerators:
Accelerators are also webserver features. It saves webpage preparation time and deliver html document in less time. Some popular accelerators like eAccelerator, APC, OpCache etc being provided by webhosting service providers along with package.
Efficient Cache Policy for Static Content
When we open a website, browser save website’s static content to local storage by default. Cache policy instruct browser about expiration time for that saved content. Contents those will not change for long time, keep cache expiration time highest possible for them.
Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A Content Delivery Network or CDN take your static contents like images, js, css etc from your webserver and distribute it to their worldwide network. If user request this data, CDN delivered it from nearest server. It saves website loading time and your server bandwidth.