Make your WordPress site run faster without having to dive deep into HTML, PHP, or CSS to do it.
Page load speed is one of the most important user experience factors for web agencies and their clients today.
When websites load fast, users bounce away from them less. As a result, search engine rankings improve and website owners make more money. It’s an important factor in any website’s overall competitiveness.
The research is very clear on this. Websites that take more than two seconds to fully load lose up to 47% of their visitors during that time. This is particularly true for e-commerce websites. Impatient customers will click away quickly and look for a more responsive web store to buy from.
WordPress websites have all the features and technologies you need to optimize page load time and get smooth, fast performance. But you have to make the right choices to get there. Many of these options don’t require you to learn how to code or perform complicated technical changes.
11 Ways To Optimize Page Load Speed on WordPress
- Purchase a Better Web Hosting Plan
The quality and speed of your hosting plan play a major role in determining how fast your WordPress website can load. If you have a low-cost shared hosting service, you may be sharing bandwidth and storage space with multiple other websites, which means you can’t guarantee a stable speed.
Dedicated hosting plans give you the ability to configure your server to optimize page load speed. It may not even be necessary to switch providers – most web hosting providers offer similar dedicated hosting plans. The more resources you dedicate to web hosting, the faster your website can load.
- Deploy a Lightweight WordPress Theme
Many WordPress website owners want to impress visitors with elaborate designs and large-scale dynamic elements. Many themes offer all of these things and more. But before you throw everything at your website visitors, consider the effect those themes have on web page loading time.
Large WordPress themes with lots of dynamic elements demand more resources. Serving a website like that to tens of thousands of visitors every second is incredibly challenging for your hosting provider. If they can’t meet peak demand, your visitors will struggle to connect, and your brand will suffer. Consider using a light theme that has just the features you want – and no more.
- Reduce Image Size Throughout the Website
Large files will slow website performance down more than anything else. Uploading images and videos directly to your WordPress site is a bad idea, but even embedded media can cause problems if the file sizes are too high.
You can easily reduce image size without impacting image quality in multiple ways. For example, switching from a large-format file like. BMP to a more efficient file format. JPG can make a significant difference. Human users cannot tell the difference, but hosting servers can.
Lightweight plugins like WP Smush can automatically optimize image file sizes to improve page load speed for you.
- Minify CSS and JavaScript files
There is a way to make JavaScript and CSS files have less of an impact on page load speed without impacting the way the code works. In fact, you don’t need to know code at all to minify these files and make them run faster.
Minifying these files just means taking out the small bits of non-functional code that programmers use to make their code human-readable. Lightweight plugins like Autoptimize can make these changes for you automatically, so you don’t even have to open up the code or delete anything yourself.
- Integrate a Solution for Advanced Caching
Caching is a simple, powerful way to reduce page loading times and improve the user experience. Instead of loading every single web page element every time a user visits your page, caching solutions store some data on the user’s system. This means that frequently loaded elements will load near-instantly, improving overall web page loading time.
WP Total Cache is one of the most trusted and reliable caching services available on WordPress. You can combine it with a more sophisticated solution like Varnish to further enhance caching results.
- Implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Without a CDN in place, you might have a single website server delivering web page elements to users everywhere in the world. If your server is located in the United States, American users will have fast access, but European, Asian, and African ones will have much slower access.
CDNs create, update, and maintain copies of your website across multiple territories so that users enjoy fast page load speeds wherever they are. This is a great way to ensure excellent page loading times for users regardless of their location.
If you know where the majority of your users are located, using a CDN that puts servers nearby that area will have a positive impact on your web page loading speed.
- Toggle GZIP Compression
Compressing files is an easy way to make them take up less space. GZIP files work just like ZIP files, but they are optimized for web-based files. GZIP compression reduces the amount of bandwidth your website takes up sending its largest files.
By reducing the consumption of bandwidth resources, you can improve page load speed on websites whose hosts don’t offer a lot of bandwidth. This could potentially be a good way to optimize page load speed without having to spend more money on a higher-tiered hosting subscription. Several plugins like PageSpeed Ninja include GZIP compression features.
- Remove Old Content From Your WordPress Database
Your WordPress database contains almost every bit of user-generated content that has ever been posted to your website. That includes fake users, spam comments, and old drafts of blogs you never posted. Taken altogether, these things can drag down website performance considerably since they all consume hosting resources.
Take time to clear out some of the content you know you’re never going to use. Spam comments and fake users actually have a powerful negative impact on brand reputation, so getting rid of them quickly is a good idea.
- Uninstall Plugins You Don’t Use
High-performance plugins can take up a lot of resources. Plugins can even use up valuable resources when you’re not using them. Unused plugins increase the size of your disaster recovery backup, which means your hosting server will work much harder while performing backup processes.
You may even be able to replace frequently used plugins with services that don’t draw resources away from your hosting provider. For example, you could replace automation and scheduling plugins with Zapier and save valuable resources in the process.
- Remove Unnecessary External Scripts
Every external script included on your WordPress website takes up a certain amount of hosting resources to complete. Most of these scripts are quite small, but if you have a large number of them they will add up quickly.
Identify which scripts are the most important. You probably want to keep Google Analytics running, but you probably have a few others you can do without. You may even be able to load scripts later and optimize page load speed without giving up on scripts at all.
- Disable Trackbacks and Pingbacks
Trackbacks and Pingbacks are core WordPress functions that alert you when your website receives an incoming link. This is great news, but not something you need to weigh down your website with. There are multiple free alternatives available, and many of them offer better analyses and data.
By far the most popular and widely recommended free service for learning about incoming links is Google Search Console. Let Google take care of processing incoming links so that your WordPress hosting service doesn’t have to.
Find Out How to Improve WordPress Website Performance
Reducing the time it takes your website to load pages improves the user experience and offers considerable SEO benefits. If you’re a web agency owner or entrepreneur who runs WordPress sites, you’ll want to optimize page load speed using tips like these.
You can go even deeper into word page speed optimization by delegating tasks to a white label WordPress developer like UnlimitedWP. Have our team optimize your WordPress websites to load quickly and run smoothly in as little as a few days’ time.
