How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site?

Tech

WordPress is a powerful content management system that has millions of users all over the world. It is one of the most popular CMS platforms and powers over 30% of the total websites on the internet. However, WordPress is not as fast as other platforms like Medium or Blogger because it uses PHP to render web pages which can be slow at times due to server response time and database queries. Here are tips to improve your wordpress speed from the best SEO services agency.  

Update WordPress and Plugins.

  • Update WordPress and Plugins.
  • Backup Your Website Regularly.
  • Optimize Database After Upgrading WordPress or Installing New Plugins/Themes.

Optimize Images.

Optimizing images is one of the easiest ways to speed up your website and improve your site’s load time. Images can make up a significant percentage of a site’s total weight, and optimizing them will help you save on bandwidth costs as well as improve user experience.

Here are some tips for optimizing images:

  • Use an online tool like TinyPNG to compress and optimize your images. This will reduce the size of the files without losing quality. You can also use WP Smush Pro or EWWW Image Optimizer if you want more options in terms of compression settings or output formats (like JPEG 2000).
  • Use a CDN that serves resources from servers closer to users (such as Cloudflare), which reduces latency and improves performance overall.

Use a Cache Plugin.

The best way to speed up your WordPress site is by using a cache plugin. This will store all of the content on your website and make it accessible from the server, which makes loading times much faster. The most popular cache plugins are WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.

How Does It Work?

A cache plugin basically stores the HTML code for all of the pages on your website and delivers it directly to visitors via a browser. When someone visits a page, they are served an HTML document instead of PHP scripts or images that need to be generated in real-time for every single visitor who comes along—saving valuable processing time for both visitors and servers alike.

Remove Query Strings From Static Resources.

Query strings are often used in URLs to pass parameters. For example, the URL for a page on your website might be:

http://www.example.com/?q=fruits

In this case, q is the query string parameter. However, static resources do not need query strings because their content does not change based on input from users or other factors. If you have a WordPress site with lots of media files (like images or PDFs), then chances are all of them will be served from the same location and should use one file name only; they should never have any query string parameters attached to them (e.g., ?q=images).

Minify CSS, Javascript and HTML Files.

Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary characters, spaces and new line characters from codes. It is a method that reduces the size of a file to improve its load time. Minified files are also known as compressed files because they have been compressed through removing unnecessary bytes from the code.

Minifying CSS, Javascript and HTML files can speed up your website by reducing the bandwidth required to download them onto visitors’ computers or mobile devices.

Avoid Landing Page Redirects.

  • Redirects are not always bad. A redirect is a way to take the user from one page and redirect them to another, usually with an HTTP status code like 301 or 302. Some examples of good uses for redirects:
  • Fixing broken links on your site
  • Changing the URL of old pages (like moving from /about-us to /company/story)
  • Preventing duplicate content by sending users to the canonical version of a page instead of an archive or other outdated version
  • Hiding a page from search engines

Reduce Server Response Time.

Reduce Server Response Time

The first thing you can do to speed up your WordPress site is reduce the number of requests. This means reducing the number of HTTP requests that are sent from your website when a user visits it. To do so, you need to take care of these three things:

  • Use fewer themes, plugins, and widgets in your website. The more files there are on a page (especially images), the longer it takes for that page to load.
  • Minimize server response time by using an optimized web host and CDN (Content Delivery Network) service provider. If you don’t want to spend money on these services then at least use W3 Total Cache plugin which will help cache all static resources like CSS files and JavaScript files automatically on every request that comes in without having any effect on other pages except when they make changes themselves which will be cached again when requested next time by anyone else as well!

Leverage Browser Caching.

Browser caching is a great way to make your site load faster. It means that the browser will download the resources for the first time and then store them in its cache so that it can reuse them later on. This technique reduces server load because you won’t have to send all of your files over and over again, which would cause unnecessary traffic and slow down your website. Using browser caching will also improve user experience since they won’t need to wait for new content to appear every single time they visit your page (which can sometimes take as long as 10 seconds).

How do I use browser caching?

In order for this method work properly, there are two things you’ll need: an HTTP header called Cache-Control that tells browsers when they can cache files; and another HTTP header called ETag which identifies whether or not something has changed since it was last requested by someone else who visited a similar page on either another website or yours! Both headers should be set up on each file so that when visitors go back through their browsers again later on down the line

After implementing the above-mentioned tips, you will notice your website to load much faster and slowly get other benefits it can bring to your site like boost in Google rankings, higher conversion rates, and more organic traffic from Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

After implementing the above-mentioned tips, you will notice your website to load much faster and slowly get other benefits it can bring to your site like boost in Google rankings, higher conversion rates, and more organic traffic from Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

To check your site speed, there are many free tools available online that you can use. These are the top ones:

  • [Google PageSpeed Insights](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) – This is a free plugin for WordPress which provides insights into how well your website is performing on various web performance criteria including mobile friendliness, image compression etc.,
  • [Pingdom Website Speed Test](https://tools.pingdom.com/) – A tool that checks how fast a page loads on different devices such as desktop computers or smartphones without any software installation required on client side computers like Chrome browser extensions do;

This information can be overwhelming therefore having an expert in this field is much recommended. Digital Marketing Philippines offers full SEO service and wordpress speed optimization services to help you score better on search engine’s algorithm.