Speed plays a vital role in determining the user experience. According to one study, it was found that if your website takes 3 seconds to load, then a large majority of visitors will abandon it and you lose visitors as well as potential clients and partners. Especially the WordPress websites are more prone to slowing down due to heavy themes and heavy usage of plugins. In this blog we are going to present some actionable tips to increase your site loading speed and keep your visitors happy:
Go For Minimalist Theme
Sophisticated WordPress templates with all twinkles and bells like sliders, social media elements, dynamic design objects, and heavy media files give your WP site an awesome look but it can also result in an awful slow speed. Heavy elements pages will delay the site loading speed and annoy your visitors.
So always choose to buy a minimalist WP theme with a straightforward uncluttered design. Not only will it boost the loading speed but will also deliver a pleasant visual experience with its neat interface, helping visitors quickly find what they are looking for. Secondly periodically audit your media elements like images, videos, etc., and do the needful to reduce the space they occupy. One best option to reduce the media size without removing them is to minimize their size with plugins like TinyPNG. Likewise, you can hire a web designing company to build the right web design for your site to give it an appealing, branded look without making it bulky.
Change Hosting Provider Or Upgrade The Plan
Hosting has a significant impact on your WP site speed. Cheap web hosting solutions like shared hosting plans help you minimize the hosting expenses but on the flip side, they also make your site slower due to a lack of proper resources especially during traffic surges and peak hours. While many providers do promise maximum uptime even on shared hosting, you often find out that such promises are rarely delivered- except for a few reputed webs hosting companies.
Actually, in shared hosting plans, you share the hardware and resources (disk space, bandwidth, etc.) with several other websites. It affects the consistent resource availability and during traffic surges when resource demand is at its peak, your site slows down. So, if you are experiencing speed issues with your shared hosting plans it is advisable to upgrade to the VPS package.
In VPS packages a single server is divided into different virtual servers- each having dedicated resources. It means that even while you share your physical server with other clients, you will still enjoy a dedicated pool of resources. Sufficient resources will ensure fast speed and performance consistency even during peak hours. VPS plans also offer you extended controls over some aspects of configuration. So, you can easily optimize your configuration for the best WP site performance.
Compress JS And CSS Files
High number of CSS and JS requests is another major reason behind slow loading speed. There are two ways to reduce these requests. The first one is a bit (or a lot) difficult and may need you to go through a learning curve. We are talking about manually fixing the CSS and JS requests and reducing them without affecting the performance, you can check the instructions in guides offered by Google on how to do that. Another, easier way is to use plugins like Autoptiize that quickly optimizes the aspects like JS, CSS, and HTML of a WP site to help you enjoy a fast-speed delivery. It is easy, quick, and doesn’t need you to go through any learning curve.
Go For Efficient Caching Plugins
Caching goes a long way in speeding up the page delivery and providing an improved user experience. You can get several caching plugins to make your site load faster. W3 Total cache is among the most popular plugins in this category. Varnish and similarly trusted sophisticated caching mechanisms will help you further speeding up your website and help your visitors get a great experience.
Minimize Size Of Media Files
One of the major concerns of sites is how to reduce the size of existing image sizes. If you utilize conventional methods like Photoshop, it will take a very long time. So it is advisable to use plugins. There are so many plugins for reducing image size that it is often a tedious task to choose the right one. However, it is best to stick with the reputed, branded plugins like WP smush and EWWW Image Optimizer.
By employing these plugins you can instantly reduce image sizes with a few easy clicks and make your site faster.
