Supercharge Your WordPress Website: Proven Tips to Boost Speed
Introduction
Whether you run a blog, a boutique e-commerce store or an enterprise site, your users are going to want to see your content as soon as possible, the moment they click onto your site! But how do you make that happen in an efficient way?
Your site might be faster than it was yesterday, but there is no reason it should not load any faster tomorrow! As such, it is essential that you optimize your website for performance from the moment you start developing it. If you have not done so already, here are the top things you can do today to improve the speed of your WordPress site.
1. Use a lightweight theme OR optimise your theme
When you are working on your WordPress site, you should always focus on reducing your page load times. If there are certain parts of your site that are taking longer than others to load, your users’ experience will suffer. There is one very effective way you can prevent this, and that’s where optimising your theme comes in. There are various ways in which you can do this.
First off, you should ensure that you are using as little images as possible! This is because images are typically a lot larger than necessary, and are also served from the server from where the visitor is located. Therefore, this will increase your load time. If you really do want to include images to improve your user experience, make sure that you compress the images while maintaining the maximum quality, and this should do wonders for your page load time!
Next up, it’s important to optimise your JavaScript and CSS files. These files are static files, so they don’t require any additional data from the server during the download. That’s why it’s beneficial to optimise them. One way to do this is by minifying the files. Minification removes unnecessary elements like extra spaces and comments from the code, making the files smaller and more efficient. This helps speed up the download process and improves your website’s performance. This will result in a smoother browsing experience for your visitors, but do keep a backup of your site before trying this out in case you were to find any errors after minify the files! For more info on how to backup your site, do check out our blog post here ………
Finally, you should make sure that your WordPress installation is optimized. When you are installing WordPress on a new server, you are putting all the files on a server into the WordPress root directory. This means that your site will be loaded from the same server you are. Therefore, you should optimize the WordPress root directory so that your site loads more quickly.
2. Make use of a CDN
In today’s digital landscape, it’s practically unthinkable to launch a website that isn’t optimized for quick loading. But fear not, my friend! As you embark on the noble quest of optimizing your site’s load time, allow me to introduce you to a content delivery network (CDN). So what is a CDN?
Now, here’s where the magic happens. CDN servers are placed strategically in different locations or data centers, and this drastically reduces the time it takes for your page to load on visitors’ browsers.
But wait, a CDN also doubles up as a security guard for your precious data. How? By dispersing it across multiple servers, it minimizes the risk of data loss, unauthorized access, or disruption caused by cyber threats. Your valuable content remains safe and available to users, even in the face of potential security breaches.
3. Train your website’s crawl behaviour
To achieve better rankings and improve user experience, training your website’s crawler is key. This training enables you to use the same URL for all your pages and images, eliminating the need to rewrite them. Not only does this contribute to faster loading times, but it also saves you valuable time and effort.
By optimizing your website’s crawl behavior, you ensure that the crawler efficiently navigates through your site, indexing and retrieving content in a streamlined manner. This results in smoother browsing experiences for your visitors and better visibility for your website in search engine rankings.
For an easy introduction to this, minimally sign up for a Google Search Console account and submit your sitemaps to Google! You can easily create an XML Sitemap using the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. Alternatively if you do need professional help, do feel free to contact us and we will see what we can do to help you guys out! By doing this, you’ll create a website that loads quickly, delights your visitors, and positions you for success in the online realm.
4. Use HTTPS for the final boost
In today’s day and age, most websites use HTTPS instead of HTTP for security reasons, but does it help optimize the loading speed of your WordPress site too? When using HTTPS, the data exchanged between your visitor’s browser and your server is encrypted, ensuring that it remains private and secure. The result? A faster page load time for your site.
HTTPS is commonly used in conjunction with the HTTP/2 protocol (for the FILOS creations website we are actually using HTTP/3!). HTTP/2 itself offers several performance optimisations when compared to HTTP/1. These optimisations allow for the parallel loading of multiple resources and more efficient data transfer, leading to faster page rendering and improved overall performance.
Conclusion
Your WordPress site might be fast today, but there is no reason it should not load any faster tomorrow.
It is essential that you optimise your website for performance from the moment you start developing it. As mentioned above, here are the top things you can do today to improve the speed of your WordPress site. These are tips that you can implement today to make your WordPress site load faster. And considering that they are relatively easy to implement, you should give them a try. With any luck, you will find that your WordPress site loads much more quickly than before.
