We are living in a fast world and fast living requires a fast website. Did you know that 80% of visitors that are not satisfied with the speed of the website would never buy from that website? This fact shows you the importance of the website’s speed.
Google algorithm is organized in that way to check for the website’s speed, and if this is not satisfactory, your website will stay hidden in the dark corners of the internet.
So, it’s obvious – the speed of your website matters! That’s why we are offering you a couple of tricks that might help you to speed up your WordPress website.
Minimize HTTP requests
Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP request is nothing more than the content of your website sent to the visitor’s browser. This includes images, text, and different multimedia that you have on your webpage. Of course, HTTP request takes time and you can arrange it to improve your website’s speed.
So, what can you do? A good and complex website requires a lot of elements so violent reducing of HTTP material is not the solution. However, you also shouldn’t have more than 30 files on your website. In order to speed up your WordPress website, you will need to know the exact number of HTTP files.
Eliminating all the unnecessary files is the next step. Be sure to use high-quality images that you can compress to a suitable file size. Websites such as Pingdom can help you check the speed of your website and see if you made any progress.
Good caching plugin is a must!
If you use CSS and Javascript for your website, there will be some elements that don’t change at all. That’s why we will introduce another useful term – caching. Caching is a process where these unchangeable elements load only once, which speeds up your WordPress website. This is especially convenient for your regular visitors and buyers.
There is a great number of cache plugins and some of them can improve the speed up to 10 times! W3 Total Cache is one of the first that we need to mention. This plugin can improve the overall performance of your website and also the conversion rates.
WP Super Cache is another plugin that you should have in mind. It deals with static HTML files and delivers them to almost every visitor (even to the visitors that are not logged in). WP Rocket is probably one of the fastest caching plugins but you will have to spend a couple of bucks to get it. However, it can be a wise investment.
Minify, minify, minify …
If you want to increase the speed of your website, you should know that minification of CSS, Javascript, and HTML is very important. What is minification? It is a process where all removable white space from your code gets erased. White space helps us read the content more easily but it doesn’t play any important role in browsers or Google algorithm.
There are many high-quality plugins that you can use to solve this problem. WP Minify is probably a plugin that will first come to your mind. It compresses your Javascript and CSS files and gives you the ability to manipulate particular files that you choose. Autoptimize is another great plugin that you should try out as it has over 200.000 downloads from WP repository, and with so many people using it-you cant go wrong! It chains different styles and scripts, minifies them, compresses them, and also deals with HTML files.
Database Table Optimization
A good website maintenance requires regular updates. However, updates will create a great database of files that can affect the speed of your website. At the moment, WordPress offers 11 tables and most of the websites will use a good number of them. Add saved plugin settings and you will get a great amount of data that lowers the performance of your website. Database optimization is a convenient way to remove all this unused data.
One of the basic ways to organize your database is with phpMyAdmin. This is a free software that you can use to deal with your databases, columns, indexes, etc, and you can find it in every shared hosting account. Plugins are a faster way to solve this issue. WP Optimize will allow you to clean your database quickly and without any manual interventions. After arranging your data, you can try GTmetrix to measure the speed of your WordPress website.
Image Compressing
The last but not least – images can notably slow you down. They are probably the biggest files that you have on your website so there is a great amount of plugins that can help you improve the speed of your website.
Tiny PNG and WP Smush.it are the first on our list. The first plugin reduces the size of PNG files on your website. WP Smush.it reduces the size but keeps the quality, which makes it an essential tool for the website maintenance. This plugin removes the unimportant data of your images and then adds them to your library.
Another term that you might find useful is lazy loading. This concept loads the images only when the visitor scrolls down your webpage. A good plugin that enables this is Lazy Load.
Bottom line
Regular maintenance of a website is essential. If you want to keep up with popular trends and achievements, you need to take some steps that will position your website on the first page of Google search. As we already mentioned, the speed of your website is one of the main factors here. Maybe these tips given above will provide you with that small boost you need to gain more visitors and customers.
Pay attention to your HTTP requests and see if you can minify CSS and Javascript files. Arrange the images and their size and find a good plugin to deal with databases. Don’t forget a proper caching plugin. When you are sure that every possible measure has been taken, check the speed of your website. If the results are in order, smile and wait for the visitors to come.
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