Unleash The Power Of Speed! Easy Hacks To Boost Your WordPress

August 20th, 2019 | Updated on March 29th, 2024

Being utterly busy nowadays, none has got enough time to bear with a slow website. And that’s possibly one of the significant reasons your site can have a high bounce rate.

Site speed matters a lot, especially if you are an e-commerce business. A lagging site does no good and leaves a bad impression on the customers as well.

Recently, even Google has cleared the air on the website loading time. Now, the website speed will be one of the crucial parameters for its ranking.

Hence, here are the 10 smart ways to speed up your WordPress website and retain visitors for longer.

Before diving into the business, don’t forget to check your website’s current speed. There are a lot of free tools available that allow you to check for your site’s loading time.

You Can Use The Following Tools

Pingdom website speed test
GTMetrix
Page Speed Insight by Google

Once you are done checking this, head over to these 10 ways to increase your website’s speed.

Speed-Up Your WordPress Website Tips

1. Avoid Too Many Plugins

If you are new to WordPress, using plugins can be a little overwhelming task for you. Not your fault.

WordPress allows you to play around with thousands of plugins and, some of them are even a necessity. But the lesser, the better. Too many plugins considerably reduce your website’s speed.

Always use the plugins that you actually need and, uninstall the unnecessary ones. Also, make sure to update them regularly. If a plugin is misbehaving and hasn’t got any updates since its installation, find an alternative to it.

2. Image Optimisation

Images are one of the most important things that you must include on your website. A blog appears to be boring without any pictures or infographics. But, using a lot of them can even slow down your website.

Images Are The Necessary Evil And, Hence, Here Are A Few Ways In Which You Can Optimise Them:

Use the Photoshop software to resize the images and save them as Web.
Always use images in .jpg format rather than.png.
Use a CDN.
You can also use Short Pixel or Smush to enable image compression and lazy loading. These plugin works amazingly and compress all the images while saving them for the web. It also converts the .png images to .jpg hence, saving you a lot of time.

3. Use Updated WordPress Themes

The beauty of WordPress is that it allows you to choose from thousands of available themes. But if you are still using an old theme, it’s time to upgrade.

Most of the latest WordPress themes have been designed considering the page loading time. Hence, before customizing any theme, make sure that it’s updated as well as responsive.

4. Choose Your Host Wisely

Many of us make a huge mistake while purchasing the host. It’s natural to fall for the low-priced ones. But you shouldn’t be doing that. Remember, if you are purchasing a free product, then you are the product.

Hence, always choose your host wisely. Consider the one that has responsive cPanel, prompt customer service, CDN, DNS, and other features to increase your site’s loading time.

5. Choose The Nearest Server Location

Most of the hosting companies allow you to choose the server location for your blog. Hence, if you are catering to the USA audience, select the server location that’s closest to the USA.

Farther the server, more time it would take to fetch the webpage.

6. Use CDN Network

Most of the websites are hosted on a particular Geo-Location. For instance, if you are using Bluehost, your website’s location would be the United States. Now, when any user from Asia tries to access the website, it would take longer to load completely.

The best possible way to minimise this distance between the user and the server is by using a CDN network. The content delivery network decreases the loading time and helps to retain the visitors.

7. Avoid Comprehensive AD Banners

Showing ads on your website is no harm as far as they are controlled and limited. The advertisements contain HTML coding that overburdens your website and increases its loading time.

If you want to show ads on your website, choose Google Adsense or Media.net as they are well-optimised.

8. Reduce DNS Lookup

One of the most common issues that affect the website’s loading time is DNS Lookup.

Got to tools.pingdom.com and run a speed test for your website. After the results are displayed, scroll down to the File Requests. Sort the results based on DNS time.

Now you can find all the third-party scripts that are over-burdening your website. You can reduce DNS lookup by implementing CDN, purchasing fast DNS provider, replacing the scripts, or by using a plugin.

WPRocket is one such WordPress plugin that prefetches DNS requests and increases the website’s speed. This plugin has got some of the cool features to speed-up your site.

9. Eliminate Transient Options

If you are using WordPress membership or WooCommerce, this tip is for you. Transient API is meant for developers to keep their database updated. In most of the cases, it expires automatically and frees up the space, thereby, increasing the loading speed. But it might not be the case every time.

Hence, you need to delete transients manually. WPRocket perfectly does the job for you. Alternatively, you can also use transient manager plugin.

10. Enable Compression

Websites are full of Javascript, CSS, HTML etc, and the best that you can do to improve your website’s speed is – compress these codes in their most basic form.

Well, you don’t have to be a hardcore coder for this because you got the plugins! You can use Enable GZip Compression plugin for the same.

Now that you know how to increase your website’s speed, you can get going straight away. Implement all of the aforementioned steps on your website and boost your chances of ranking in the SERPs.

However, if you don’t have enough time to look after your website, a digital marketing company is always there to help you out. From website designing to marketing your business, they would handle all of it.