The speed of a website is one of the most important factors in defining its user experience. If your website loads slowly then most of the visitors will tend to leave it in search of a better alternative and you may lose some potential customers as they may not consider coming back to your site. Moreover, google now includes the page load speed in its parameters to calculate the page rank. If your site is loading slow then it will hamper its search engine rankings.
Now when you know that the slow speed can cause a serious downfall in your website’s popularity, you need to be more concerned about it. You should check your website for loading speed and if it is taking too long to load, you need to work on it.
Here are some suggestions that can improve the speed of your website:
Web Host Selection:
Your web host has a huge impact on the performance of your website including its speed. The sluggishness of the server on which your website is hosted makes your website load really slow. This generally happens when you are using a shared hosting or a cheap hosting service to cut down your costs. Moreover, a poor web host cause frequent down times to your website.
Choosing a good web host for your website is the very first step in order to have a fast loading site. The DNS response time with a good host will be as low as 7 milliseconds and with a poor host it can go up to 250 milliseconds. So, you can see how vital is to choose a good host to speed up your website.
Theme Selection:
The theme of your website will be contributing to the loading speed of your site. If it is well coded and efficient then it will ensure you a fast loading website and if it is poorly coded then it will make your website slow. While choosing a theme check the page speed of the theme’s demo and make sure the theme is not bloated with extra code which makes it too heavy.
Use a CDN:
CDN stands for the Content Delivery network. A CDN delivers the static files of your website to the user through the nearest server location instead of your website’s server. It makes your site load faster. Moreover, a CDN makes sure that the user hits the cache instead of reaching your server and it will take lesser time in accessing the cache than fetching data from the server. Using a CDN can reduce the bandwidth usage almost up to 50% which can considerably increase the loading speed of your website.
Proper Caching:
The loading speed of your website will also depend on the caching of your site. Caching allows the browser to store some static files. You can use an effective caching plugin for this purpose. It will allow your visitors to load files from the browser cache instead of requesting the files from the server which saves a lot of time and increases the loading speed of your website.
Minimizing the number of HTTP requests:
CSS files or Javascript or images are added to your website to enhance the design and functionality of the website. All of these flies acts as HTTP requests. Even the plugins you use have their own CSS and Javascript. When a visitor comes to your site then all the corresponding files to that page will be sent to the visitors browser. The website will take more time to load in case of a higher number of these files.
You can reduce the number of HTTP requests by removing the unnecessary files or inactive plugins from your site. You can also reduce the requests by combining the CSS and JavaScript files into a single file which can help to increase the loading speed of your website.
Compress the images:
Images are the heaviest files on your website and utilize the major part of the bandwidth. Compress the images on your WordPress website and it will help you to bring down the load time of your website. You can use a plugin for this purpose to compress your images to reduce the image size while retaining the quality of the image.
Database Optimization:
The database stores all the information about your WordPress website. WordPress keep saving everything like unapproved comments, trackbacks, pingbacks, trashed items, post revisions etc. Which makes your database very bulky. A page to loaded will read the database every time, if the database is bulky then it will take a longer time to find the information and display it.
This makes it vital to clean up your database regularly. The routine optimization of your database will help you to improve the speed of your website.
Using CSS sprites:
A sprite is a large image containing a number of images of your website altogether. CSS allows you to display the needed part and hide everything else using the set of coordinates. A CSS sprite helps to increase the loading speed of your website as a single large image load faster than a number of small separate images.
Replace PHP with HTML wherever possible:
PHP helps you to create an efficient website and minimize the need to repeat the same information again and again. The problem arises because of the fact that it uses server resources to call information through PHP. For this reason, it ios better to replace PHP with HTML wherever possible, HTML saves processing time and helps your site to load faster.
Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks:
When someone puts a link of one of your posts to some other blog or website then a pingback or a trackback to notify you about the same. Trackbacks are manual while the pingbacks are automatic, most of these are spams wich considerably increase the load speed of your website. You can turn off these trackbacks and pingbacks from the settings area under the discussions. It will help to improve the speed of your site.
You need to make some of these simple and easy tweaks in your website which can really enhance the loading speed of your site. So, do you want to have a lightening fast website? Just follow the above-given tips and you are done…
About Author:
Marie Thomas is an expert WordPress developer having years of experience in working with various web development technologies. Currently, she is working for a leading Custom WordPress Development Company – WordSuccor Ltd.. She is always trying to share her intangible knowledge with others on the web.
