18 Mar 11 Helpful Tips on How to Reduce Loading Time of a WordPress Website

The website loading speed affects not only in its position in the search results, but also provides better user experience and increases conversion. In 2010, Google reported that website loading speed affects its position in its SERP. If you want to increase the organic traffic to your website, increase its loading speed as soon as possible. Slow loading websites irritate users and they leave your site immediately without taking any action. Such websites have a lower ranking on the web and its owners start to feel the loss in the web-based business.

So, how to make your WordPress website faster and load quickly on all devices? Let’s find out.

1. Choose A High-Quality WordPress Theme

Each WordPress site is based on a theme or pager framework, which contains a lot of functionalities. The WordPress theme developers have different approaches to create their products. So, WordPress themes differ significantly from each other. You need to choose a good-quality theme that has only necessary features and functionalities and loads fast on all devices. If possible, avoid using free WordPress themes because they may have malicious coding and lots of junk which can slow down your site.

2. Choose A Reliable Hosting Server

Hosting is the main factor that affects the speed of your WordPress site. It may seem like a good idea to place your new website on a shared hosting provider that offers “unlimited” bandwidth, space, email, domains, and more as it helps you save some money. But, shared hosting environments do not provide good load times during peak traffic hours. Also, they don’t provide 99 percent uninterrupted site backup. Shared hosting causes lower performance of your site in the long run as you share the same server space with countless other websites. So, buy dedicated cloud servers to make your WordPress site load faster on all devices. Check out our list of the Best WordPress Hosting Providers and learn how switching to a premium hosting option can improve the performance of your website.

3. Image Optimization

Images are the main contributors to increase the size of web pages. You should compress images without compromising quality. If you manually optimize images using Chrome PageSpeed ​​Insights, Photoshop or any other tools, it will take a long time. Use WordPress plugins to reduce the size of the images and make your website faster.

4. Minimize JS and CSS files

Test your website in the Google PageSpeed ​​Insights tool to know the size of CSS and JS files. by reducing the number of calls to CSS and JS and the size of these files, you can improve the loading speed of the state. You can use Autoptimize Plugin to perform this action automatically or hire a WordPress development company for the same.

5. Customize WordPress Caching

Caching is another powerful tool to make your website faster. Caching allows you to store pages and records as static files that are quickly delivered to the user, without creating a load on the server and not wasting time on the dynamic formation of pages. So, implement browser and server caching to make your site faster. For a WordPress website, use WordPress Caching Plugins which is not only helps you to improve your site’s speed but also save you from losing your potential visitors and the Google search engine rankings.

6. Try 100 Page Limit In WordPress If Possible

While planning the structure of your website, it is worth remembering that WordPress was not designed to work with a large number of pages. If there are a large number of pages on the site in the admin panel, brakes will start to appear due to lack of sufficient memory. Nevertheless, it will not affect the frontend in any way.

Pages on your website should have a hierarchy. For any actions on the pages, you need to upload a whole tree of templates on the backend in order to determine the relationship of the pages with each other. It creates a large amount of data, which affects the loading speed of your site. The solution to this problem is the use of custom post type. convert a large number of pages into custom post types to make your site faster.

7. Use Plugins in Limited Numbers

A common cause of WordPress site breakdown is a large number of installed plugins that put additional pressure on its server. To maintain optimal performance of your WordPress site, you should limit the use of plugins as far as possible. There are many plugins that allow you to assess the degree of influence of installed plugins on website speed. When installing new plugins on the site, just pay attention to the date of the last update of the plugin and compatibility with the current version of WordPress. Don’t use outdated plugins.

You should refrain from such plugins on the site as they are no longer supported and may lead to problems with performance and security. Implement the necessary functionality on your site with the help of WordPress development agency. The quality of plug-ins can also affect the performance of a WordPress site. Not all plugins are created by professional developers. Compare several plugins to choose the fastest and most optimized ones.

8. Use a CDN

Individuals from all over the world visit your website depending on its ranking on the web. It goes without saying that the site’s download speed will be different if visitors are located far away from its server location.

There are many CDN (content delivery networks) that help you to keep the site’s loading speed to a minimum for visitors from different countries. It is because DN stores a copy of your website in various data centers located in different places and serve a web page to a visitor from the nearest possible location. It reduces HTTPs requests to your site significantly and makes it load faster on all devices.

9. Keep External links A Minimum

Always keep in mind that using external scripts on web pages adds a large amount of data to the total load time. So, it is best to use only a small number of scripts, including only basic ones, such as tracking tools (for example, Google Analytics ) or comment systems (for example, Disqus).

10. Cleanup WordPress Database Regularly

Getting rid of unwanted data from the database will keep its size to a minimum and help reduce the size of backups. So, from time-to-time, remove spam comments, fake users, old drafts of your content, and perhaps even unwanted plugins. this will reduce the size of your databases and web files and make your website load faster on all devices.

11. Deactivate Pingbacks And Trackbacks

Always keep in mind that Pingbacks and trackbacks are the two main components of WordPress that alert you whenever your blog or page gets a link. It is useful, but you also have things like Google’s webmaster tools and other services to check your site’s links. Saving pingbacks and trackbacks can also create an unwanted load on server resources because whenever someone tries to connect to your site, it generates requests from WordPress back and forth. Always note that it is widely used when targeting a website using DDoS attacks. So, Disable Pingbacks And Trackbacks as soon as possible to make your site faster.

Final Words

The biggest advantage of reducing the load time of your website is it increases its SEO ranking and performance as a whole. The case remains the same regardless of whether they use mobile devices, PC, or laptop to access websites. Use these methods to make your WordPress site faster and take your business to the next level. Best of Luck!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jason Daszkewicz is a Senior WordPress developer and passionate blogger. Currently, he is associated with WordSuccor – WordPress Development Agency in USA. He is well known for his professional writings and technical blogs. He loves to share useful information regarding WordPress. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.