When it comes to your website's loading time, every second counts. The need for speed nowadays translates into every aspect of life, including the time spent browsing the web.
In fact:
Now, the next logical step towards fixing the problem with your website is identifying it by running a speed test.
Pingdom is a well-known and free tool that offers website monitoring services. Another great thing about this tool is that it has a user-friendly interface, offers easy-to-follow summaries and it helps you to easily identify the existing issues with your website.
Once you’ve identified the issues it should be a little easier to fix the problem.
Think about your WordPress website like a body. If you want to strengthen the whole body you have to find ways to strengthen the core.
Now, what is the core of your website? Your website’s core would be the hosting, themes and plugins. Keeping these simple and uncluttered will help make it stronger, aka faster.
When it comes to choosing a server to host your website, you have to do your research. Reliable and fast hosting options aren’t always the cheap ones. The quality of the hosting service is definitely linked to how much you have paid for it.
Choosing a theme can be overwhelming, especially with so many options to choose from. A solid framework and clean theme are going to help your website run faster. This way you won’t need excessive plugins, which will keep your website uncluttered.
W3 Total Caches is a plugin designed to improve your website’s user experience by increasing server performance. It can also help with loading speed by reducing download times and providing transparent content delivery network integration.
When it comes to using plugins for your website avoid installing non-essential ones. Every once in a while it’s best to do a check-up of the plugins you already have: keep the ones that work and get rid of the faulty ones.
An image optimizer will reduce the file size of an image while maintaining its quality. WP-Smushit is a free plugin that can do this automatically for you while also boosting your SEO.
Optimising your homepage contributes to a faster website loading time. The homepage is the page that needs to work faster since it’s also the one that most users will be landing on.
A few quick ways to optimize it are:
All in all, just keep it simple and minimalist - it will look better and load faster.
Database optimisation plugins are simple but effective clean-up tools for your website database; an automatic organiser. WordPress offers many options for database optimisation, such as WP-Optimize and WP-DBManager.
Revision Control is a simple plugin that allows you to control the amount of post revisions stored. Less clutter means more storage space and faster loading time.
When a post contains lots of images it may take longer until they can all load. This plugin can help with this - it loads the images above the fold and as the reader scrolls down, the other images begin to load just before they come into view.
CloudFare is a great tool that can not only increase the loading speed of your website but can also offer the website its needed security. Along with the W3 Total Cache plugin, they make a great combination th