To get popular or succeed online, each webmaster needs to notice his or her website loading speed. It is not only a critical factor for ranking, but also an important metric for usability. If you are a visitor to others’ website, we think you must quickly skip those websites making you waiting for a while. The direct action you must take is to go to other websites having the same content you need.
Therefore, we can understand that to keep and engage more people on your websites, you need to optimize your site loading speed. Here we bring a good news that you can still follow these skills to make up and speed up your website loading.
Tips to Improve Your WordPress Website Loading Speed
When you use the WordPress as the platform to create and run your websites, it should be an out of the box content management system with fast loading speed. However, there are many plugins, videos, images, and custom themes added on as you need. That is the source of problems, having bad effect on website loading speed. We understand it and now conclude some useful tips to deal with that kind of issues.
Number 1: Deactivate unnecessary plugins
Webmasters always install some testing plugins that might are used only once, but they often forget to uninstall them. Therefore, those unnecessary plugins should be eliminated or deactivated from your WordPress to get rid of that negative impact. Note you have to install or deactivate them, because if you don’t, these plugins can still be loaded and affect website speed. This is just the first step to clear up our WordPress platform.
Then, there is a second one you can do. Go through your plugins that you are using and check out that whether or not there are some plugins which can be replaced by other ways without the plugins. If you really find out that kind of plugins, you can totally deactivate them.
The two steps might only speed up a few seconds, but it indeed has a good effect on you loading time.
Number 2: Optimize your heavy content
As we all know, images and other visual content are always the factors leading to slow speed for not only your WordPress site pages but also many other platforms. However, there is a fact that those high quality images as well as other kinds of visual content are significant to drive more traffic and have a good effect on SEO. Therefore, it is impossible for us to remove them all on a website.
As for this issue, what you need to do is to try your best to minimize the file size but keep the quality of the content. In below, we are to introduce 5 methods for this problem.
- Before you upload the heavy content like images, you need an image optimizer.
- If the images have already been loaded on your WordPress site, you need to choose a certain plugin for the image file size optimization.
- Please keep your WordPress always with the latest version, because there are many responsive images you can make full use of.
- There is CDN solutions for heavy image delivering to your users on their network, which can decrease the number of requests and the size of that page that originally load from your own server.
- You should take good advantages of lazy load. It can make the needed images in a post or a page are load within any browser, only when the users are scrolling down the post or the page. Checking out the market, you can find many plugins that can help you without any changes done to your WordPress site.
About videos, the most effective way to minimize the impact on your loading speed is to firstly upload them to those streaming service like YouTube. After that, you embed those uploaded videos on the site. Additionally, please make sure that you do not auto play those videos.
Number 3: Use caching plugins
As for WordPress websites, caching is absolutely a good helper for optimizing loading speed. With it, WordPress can create the static HTML version of your site pages and display it to users, instead of directly generating the whole page from beginning each time when there is the page request.
It only demands fewer resources and makes faster process. Meanwhile, users at your site can get better online experience. You even needn’t worry about the caching system, because it must be smart enough to know which page need to cache and which one doesn’t need, so that each page on your site can deliver the same experience to users.
For choosing the best caching plugin for your WordPress website, you need to test and compare them. Besides, although we know the configuration of the caching plugin is easy, you still need to be careful and read the installation guide before doing it.
Number 4: Optimize WordPress DB
Actually, WordPress really works based on MySQL DBs. One of the most attractive advantages is that WordPress make users use it to start their website very easy. Besides editing content and posts, you do not need to learn other more skills or technical knowledge to maintain it. However, there is one thing you have to know is that with the content and post changes and updates, your database will get bigger and bigger, and you’d better to know when to maintain the system is good.
What’s better, that work can be done without running SQL queries or logging in to the database. Currently, the most popular plugins for that is Wp-optimize which make you optimize the database.
You cab delete those unnecessary posts revisions. You might do not know that when you are editing the post, every time you save draft, there will be a version of that post saved in your database. Therefore, the first thing you need to do to optimize your WordPress database it to clear those revisions. Besides, you can also delete the spam comments and re-index the WordPress database tables.
Additionally, you can even make the plugin only active when you need. You can run it once a month or you can activate by using schedule functionality, so that the database can activate and ran automatically every two weeks.
Number 5: Do not directly load resources from other sites in your header
Remember that do not include other external resources, excluding Google analytics. If you really need it, you’d better load it after the page has already been loaded.
According to our experience, we know that there must be a number of users who do not realize that the action of adding code and scripts from outside website can lead to slowing down their websites at all.
Supposed that you have already added other resources from others’ websites, then when your page is loaded, the WordPress installation can try to load those resource defined in your header. However, if others servers fail to response quickly, then this loading delay of course occur on our site!
Therefore, when you have to add other scripts or code, please play them in footer or utilize asynchronous scripts, which will not impact the page’s initial loading.
Number 6: Utilize Google Page Speed Module
For VPS users, there is another alternative! You can make full use of Google Page Speed Module. It can be installed on the webserver and focuses on caching as well as optimizing your CSS and HTML, but never change your site a little.
It is easy to use and powerful but to install it, you have to ask your hosting provider to help you. During this process, there is technical knowledge needing you to notice so that you can configure this module correctly.
Conclusion
Do not look down upon the page speed, it is vital and should be founded in your regular checking list. To optimize it is not only the one-time program but a long-term task. It needs your attention all the time. However, there are many premium plugins available on the market for you to take care of page loading speed issues. Please always keep your WordPress and the plugins used on the platform up to date, and follow our tips above, then you could always deliver faster page speed to your visitors.