Boosting your WordPress website is one of the best ways to increase your website performance. In every website, loading speed plays a very important factor. According to a research taken by Google in 2018, more than half of mobile website visitors leaves a website if the website takes more than 3 seconds to load.
And not only that, Google also ignores your website on their search results if your website loads slow. And that is why it is also an important part for improving your website SEO.
How to check your website speed?
Before you start working on your website speed, first let’s check out what is your current website speed is.
There are many websites to check your loading speed. The most popular sites to check your website speed are PageSpeed Insights by Google, pingdom, GTmatrix, dareboost, Web Page Test etc. Among them I personally like GT Matrix () and PageSpeed Insights.
How to Boost 10X Faster your WordPress site?
Now that you have checked your website loading time, you might have seen some suggestions given by the speed test tools. They can be a little tricky to understand if you are a beginner. Therefore I’ll be showing you some techniques that you can use to dramatically boost WordPress site.
Get better web hosting
First things first, make sure that you have taken a good web hosting that provides a reasonable average loading speed. Because if your server takes much time to load, you cannot do much to boost your website speed. I would suggest you to take WordPress hosting other than shared hosting. Shared hosting may look cheap but the main thing is your server will be shared with many other websites and your website may get slower over time. Some good companies that provides WordPress hosting with fast average page speed are , a2hosting.com, siteground.com etc.
Use a caching plugin
This is the most effective method to boost your WordPress website. When you have many visitors on your website, your server needs more CPU and RAM which makes your website to load slower. In this case what cache plugins does is they converts your dynamic WordPress blog into static HTML files, and makes your website faster to load.
There are many WordPress cache plugins out there. The most popular ones are WP fastest cache, W3 total cache, WP super cache, autoptimize etc. Among them the one I like the most is WP fastest cache. And the reason behind it is along with providing cache options, the plugin also does minify HTML, minify CSS, Gzip compression, leverage Browser caching, combine CSS, combine JS etc. It also has cdn support.
ALSO READ: Top 5 must have plugins for your WordPress site.
Minify codes and optimize images
The main goal here is to reduce the size of your page. The more the page size is the more time it will take to load. Minification of HTML, CSS, JS files of your website reduces the page size. If you don’t know, minification is the process of reducing file size by removing any unnecessary codes, white spaces, code comments, formatting etc.
Another thing that increase page size is the images you use for your webpage. In fact, a single image can take more than the actual page size. Therefore optimization of images is a must. Some popular WordPress image Optimizer plugins are EWWW Image Optimizer, Smush, Imagify Image Optimizer etc.
Use JPG/JPEG images as much as possible instead of PNG images. PNG images usually takes more space than JPG/JPEG image formats.
Quick Tip: Do not upload direct videos on your website. Embed them from Youtube or other platforms instead.
Use CDN
CDN in short for Content Delivery Network is a service that offers cached servers over the world. That takes your website files and stores them to different geographical locations and serves the contents based on the the nearest server location from the user. That is how they manage to boost your WordPress website speed.
Some most known CDN providers are Cloudflare, MaxCDN, Amazon cloudfront etc.
Carefully choose your plugins
Plugins are an essential tool to extend the functionalities or design of your website. Although they serves many purposes, extensive amount of plugins can also slow your website. Think about that, the more plugins you use the more are the chances that they will bring CSS, JS, PHP and database calls. Only use the plugins that are essential for your website and also notice if using of any particular plugin decreases your loading time.
Use proper WordPress theme
It is important that you choose a proper theme for your website. When you choose your WordPress theme you should not only notice the design of the theme but also check if the theme is lightweight or not.
Also carefully choose the widgets, ad placements etc. you use. Excessive amount to these can also slow your website.
If you follow the steps I mentioned above then I believe that your website is already boosted 10X faster. If you have any questions or issues feel free to mention them in the comment section and I will be happy to help you.
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