How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site In 2019?

WordPress is growing as a platform for startup and big companies who wish to make a permanent mark on the digital field. With age and time, it is improving and recently millions of customers are using it for their business. Despite its countless features, it suffers from one major problem. If you do not take corrective measures after building the site, it will become slow and ooze out clients and online visitors. In case you are wondering what can be done, this article can help you out. So, read along and know how to speed up your WordPress site in 2019.

Why Speed Matters for WordPress Websites?

As per the golden rule, a site handler has just 3 seconds to attract visitors’ attention and convince them to stay on the site. In that regard, a slow working site can hamper responsiveness and reduce user satisfaction. Speed affects SEO ranking. Hence, online revenues can fall down enormously. But with some strategic planning, you can accelerate your site made with WordPress application.

Selecting the Host for your Website

A shared host might suit the pockets but it can become a bone of contention in the long run. It can bring down your site’s ranking through a frequent downtime and can reduce organic traffic as well. Its negative impact is more evident when you try to publish an article or blog. Therefore, it is necessary to invest in a good hosting for accelerating the site.

A Solid Framework for Rescue  

WordPress offers endless themes and plugins that can generate interest among the site owners. But most of them can prove to be unnecessary. It is true that for site building, you only need a few features. You can leave others to make your site easy going, navigable, and super fast. So that Google bots can crawl your page easily and the loading speed will increase in the process.
 
As a website owner, you might doubt this point but keep in mind, fewer features express more. You can create a strong online presence without using all the characteristics of WordPress. All you need is a customized pattern that suits well with your company’s requirements and client demands.

Effective Utilization of Plugins

To save the page from bloating, you need the correct set of plugins. Excessive and unnecessary add-ons can drastically reduce the loading speed. Therefore, you must use the ones that fall under the cache category. The plugins under this classification are free and follow an easy installation process.

Apply Content Delivery Network for the Accelerating Process

Most of the business blogs use WordPress for online marketing. But for effectively utilizing it for network alliance, they apply CDN or Content Delivery Network. It is the forum which controls the server and the static files. JavaScript, CSS is some complex coding procedures that fall under the static files. With CDN, the dashboard becomes simpler and the user can download it hassle-free.
 
How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site
 

Automatically or Manually Optimize Pages

Reducing or adjusting the page size is necessary if you are viewing your site on smartphones or small screens. But you need to make sure that the quality is not affected. Doing the work from the very core can be time-consuming but you can get hold of free plugin tools that serve this end. Plus, you can take advice from experts that have years of knowledge in this field.

Optimizing the Home or Welcome Page for Speeding up Loading Process

An easy loading page gains brand trust and is followed by millions for customers. They can avail the best features without testing their patience. As a matter of fact, the landing page is an essential part of any site. If it is not catchy and responsive, then there are chances that you will lose your potential customers out. Make sure the following points are covered while you are using WordPress in designing the online page.
 

  • Use excerpts and try not to use full posts to increase visitor interest.
  • Reduce the number of blog posts to 5 on every page.
  • Include necessary widgets in posts and eliminate the rest from your home page.
  • In connection with the above point, eliminate unnecessary inactive plugins.
  • Minimum is the key. To maximize profits and speeding up WordPress make sure the readers are not welcomed with widgets they dont even want. This can seriously hamper your subscriber list.

 
All these points can help to build a neat and focused home page that is compact, professional and quick.

Keep Check the WordPress Database

This is one of the neglected parts after the site is built. Owners often forget to optimize their database and the consequence is bad. It fills up their blog with spam, drafts, useless tables, post revisions etc. As a result, the development cost increases enormously.
 
Optimization of your site’s database can be done through tools or by seeking assistance from professionals. They can help to schedule work in such a fashion that the overhead costs are kept within check.

Disable Hotlinking Feature

In simple terms, it is a common way of theft. It occurs when similar websites link their images with your site. As a consequence, the server load becomes high and the speed of the page reduces. This can seriously damage your site in the long run. The online visitors might scrape images as well as contents and become more popular despite your hard efforts.
 
This especially happens when you customize images and do not take enough measures to protect it. Hence, you should disable the hotlinking option. This also helps in preventing your page from the hands of leeching.

Expires Header for Static Content and Resources

An Expires Header is the way of specifying a time period. It saves the users time from re-fetching the static content like JavaScript, images, CSS files, etc. Through its application, you can significantly reduce the loading procedure for frequent users. Through adjustments in the settings, you can modify the time period.
 
The Expires Header’s primary function is to direct the browser to store resources like JPEG images. As the result, the site credibility increases and the bounce rates become lower. But in the long run, this adds up to unrequired and unnecessary HTTP requests. Therefore, think twice before setting the Expires Headers for your e-commerce site.

Adjust Gravatar Images

Globally recognized Avatars are the icons that appear in the comment section on the WordPress dashboard. Though they are good at attracting visitors, they take up a lot of loading power.
 
Hence, do not add images that take up the loading process and do not provide additional benefits. Goofy images may look attractive but they are useless in terms of gaining efficiency. It is better to add blank space rather than keeping a gravatar logo that plays no function at all.

LazyLoad for Image Selection

It is the procedure in which few images are visible above the folded load. Meaning thereby that the visitors or readers will see only those images available on the browser window. The rest will download when they scroll down the page. This is a good process of speeding up the application and saving the time of the online onlookers. The procedure also manages to reduce the bandwidth of data.

Eliminate Post Revisions

The number of post revisions stored as drafts can seriously deter the speed of the site. This is one of the greatest disadvantages of the WordPress application. It stores every single word of the context as a draft and too much of anything puts a load. It is recommended to delete the write-ups once the work is edited and published.
 
For a site owner, it is necessary for him to keep a keen eye and make sure not much mistakes are made in the content. Storing 2-3 post revisions are necessary for emergency cases but that must be the maximum limit.

Switch off Pingbacks and Trackbacks

WordPress Pingbacks and Trackbacks are good in notifying the site owner about comments that work in other blogs. This upgrades the content data since you can know who mentioned you in the comment section.
 
As a result, you can improve your work to a large extent. On the other hand, this can also generate a sense of fear among the site users. Pingbacks and trackbacks links add a lot of spam messages to the sites. And this acts as the technique that Black Hat SEO learners use to damage other sites. Hence, if you are unaware, there are chances that the outbound links are fake and detrimental to the website’s well-being.
So, switch it off and be rest assured that it will not hamper the genuine backlinks.

Static HTML is Better than PHP

Though most applications still use Hypertext Preprocessor or PHP in the coding part, it is always better to go for HTML. PHP makes the page dynamic and varies in performance among different browsers. On the other hand, HTML does not vary in performance. It is compatible with different browsers and works on the client-side approach.
 
This, in turn, benefits the site performance. Though PHP performs multiple functions it puts a lot of pressure on the server. Hence, it is better to follow the HTML coding language.

Use CloudFlare

This web analytics is similar to the Content Delivery Network and can speed up the loading speed of the WordPress application. Moreover, this in coordination with some other cache plugins, can enhance the site security.

Wrapping Up

WordPress sites are pretty different from other websites created with other notable CMS. There are quite a few advantages but the problems also vary. But adjusting a few factors can speed up the loading process and also enhance the security measures. Hope this article was helpful and you could gain an insight into the site’s functioning.

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