Every website owner aims at having the best website that tops its competitors. To achieve that, you will need a website that loads fast and provides an exceptional user experience. Such a website leads to lower bounce rates and improved conversion rates, and so on.
In this article, we will learn how to speed up your WordPress website. But before we get to that, if you are considering crafting a static WordPress site, you can use a WordPress static site generator plugin to come up with a static HTML form of your website. According to FLATsite, the best part is that you can host it anywhere.
Why is Loading Speed Important?
When it comes to boosting a website’s performance, some people focus on website content and design. Unfortunately, some overlook how their website loads, which is a key factor as it affects the website’s user experience, conversion rates, SEO rankings, bounce rates, etc.
Here are issues that could trigger your WordPress site to slow down;
What Causes a WordPress Site to Slow Down?
The issues that cause a WordPress site to slow downfalls into two categories which include;
Frontend performance –refers to how your WordPress site is optimized. You can improve frontend performance by making the right choices when creating a WordPress website. For instance, you should not use several poorly-optimized WordPress plugins, load multiple third-party scripts, load unoptimized and large images and use a heavy WordPress theme, and so on.
Backend performance- the duration the server takes to deliver files. This problem stems from your hosting. You can boost backend performance by enhancing the efficiency of your server through page caching, optimizing databases and utilizing the latest PHP version.
Let’s look at how you can boost your WordPress site speed;
Tips on how to Boost the Loading Speed of your WordPress Website
Utilize Fast WordPress Hosting
You can boost your site’s backend performance if you pick performance-oriented WordPress hosting. This means that if you have slow hosting, your website will be slow despite doing an excellent front-end optimization job. For exceptional results, go for managed WordPress hosting options.
Use (CDN) Content Delivery Network
CDN can boost your website’s load times through caching static content in a larger network featuring ‘edge’ servers across the globe. This way once your visitors get to your page, they don’t have to download content from your primary server. Instead, they’ll download from the closest edge location. Since the physical distance is short, downloading files will be easy and fast.
Use Page Caching
You can improve the performance of your site by implementing page caching. This is more important if you are using cheap shared hosting. If you activate caching, your load times could reduce by half. Essentially, a WordPress website server assembles every page whenever a visitor clicks your site. By the time it delivers complete HTML to your visitors’ browser, much time is spent. But page caching eradicates this issue as it stores completed HTML page products inside a cache. This way, your server will deliver HTML without all the hassle.
Optimize JavaScript
It’s critical that you minify and incorporate your JavaScript, but you may need to remove some JavaScript files to avoid problems. You can optimize using WP Rocket or Autoptimize. Other than that, you should avoid loading JavaScript so as not to block load on the fold content.