Why site speed is important and how to speed up your WordPress website

WordPress is an open source content management tool which is using for creating website. WordPress has designed in PHP language and it is easy to use.

By installing WordPress, beginners can easily create their websites. Nowadays, most of websites are created on WordPress.

Moreover there a lots of plugins and themes available in WordPress Library with the help of which it is easy to create a website using WordPress for a beginner. There are some free plugins and themes and some of them are premium with additional functionality.

Every person wants to load their websites quickly on internet. But sometimes WordPress websites are opening too slow due to many reasons like some bad plugins and themes and by using the older version of WordPress etc.

Basically there are many reason which are slow down the performance of WordPress website. In this article we will explain you about that things which are responsible to slow down the WordPress website and how you can optimize it.

Now we will explain all the above mentioned topics one by one. Lets start from the first topic.

What is the importance of speed for a Website?

Nowadays, a high speed website can impress the users to stay on your website. If your website is opening very fast then users wants to stay on it and they will read the content of your website.

If your website take too long to open then nobody wants to visit to your website because all the users wants quick response. So if your website is not optimized and opening too slow then users will leave your website and turn to another website.

Also an optimized website can help you in SEO. We have searched that now Google shows those websites at the top of the search list which are optimized and which have very less response time. So if your website is optimized then it will showing at the top of search list of Google and you will get more traffic on your website.

How you can check the speed of your website?

Normally when we open our websites in our personal Computer/Laptop in which websites are open very fast and we think that there is nothing wrong with our website. But this is wrong. You will think that why this is wrong? You dont worry we will explain you about this in this article.

When we open our website in our laptop/computer for the first time then an image of our website will save in our browser’s cache. Then every-time we will open our website it will loaded from browser’s cache and open quickly and we think that our website is having no issue.

So it is most important to check website’s loading speed. There is many tools are available on Google from which you can check your website’s speed.

We always recommend to our clients to use GTmetrix for checking their website’s loading speed. It provides an accurate result for every website and is available free of cost on Internet.

You can also check the recommendations given under the GTmetrix report for optimizing your WordPress.

What things are affecting the speed of your website?

There are many reasons which are responsible for slowing down your website’s performance. You can check the recommendation in the GTmetrix report and improve your website’s speed but few technical things are much difficult to understand by the newbies.

So here are some basic reasons which are responsible to slow your website’s performance:

Web Hosting: This is most important to choose a good Web Hosting provider. If the server of your hosting is not properly configured then it will affect your website.

Outdated WordPress: If you are using an older version of WordPress then it also slow down your website speed. So always keep your WordPress Up to date.

Plugins & Themes: If you will use un-optimized or heavy plugins or themes for your WordPress then it will affect your website’s performance.

Page Size: Page Size of your website is directly affect your website’s performance. If the page size of your website is high then your website take too long to respond.

How to optimize your WordPress website and increase the speed of your website?

In above steps we have provides the short summary on WordPress and what things affects your WordPress website’s performance. Now we will explain in details that which things affecting the performance of your website and how you can optimize your WordPress website.

For optimizing your wordpress following things will help you:

1) Choose Best Hosting Provider:

Basically everyone thinks that the hosting providers having no role in their website’s performance. But it is wrong. This is most important to choose a Good Shared Hosting platform for your website.

If you are on shared hosting then it is most important to check about your hosting provider in detail. Because in shared hosting many users can host on a single server. So all the users will share the resources of the server between each other. If any user will have much traffic on his website then it may also affect on your website’s performance.

So it is most important to choose a good shared hosting provider which have well configured servers and all the clients will not affect on each other.

Moreover if you are confused that how you can choose a better hosting provider then you can check the reviews of the hosting providers on Google. Also always choose that hosting providers which provides complete WordPress support.

We recommend you to go for managed WordPress hosting because Managed WordPress hosting providers have well configured servers in which no website can affect on other website’s performance.

2) Install a Light and fast Theme:

Always use a fast and well designed theme for your WordPress. If you will install a theme on your WordPress which is have many extra features and which are useless for your website then this theme is not good for your website.

If your theme is heavy and not well designed then it can slow down your website. We recommend you to not use that theme which provides you the feature to change everything in your WordPress directly from your theme.

A heavy theme will have many useless feature. When you are trying to open your website, this theme sends many requests for opening all their features which will affect your website’s speed.

So always use a simple and optimized theme which don’t have any extra features. WordPress’s default theme is well designed and well coded. So you can use default theme for your WordPress.

If you want to use another theme then use those theme which is highly rated and recommend by other peoples.

3) Install Secure and Monitor your Plugins:

Nowadays many plugins are available for WordPress. All the plugins are having many features. So it is most important to know that which plugin is good for your WordPress.

Before installing a plugin you must research about the plugins. Use those plugins which are optimized and highly rated by the peoples. Also always use those plugins which are compatible with your WordPress’s version.

If you will use any plugin without any research then it may slow down your website as well as affect on the working of WordPress. These plugins can infect your website and crash your whole WordPress website.

There are of the plugins which we ar not allowing to install if you are hosting your website with us:

Updraft: We have already enabled the automatic backup option on our server. So you don’t need to install and backup plugin to backup your WordPress website. In case you need a backup you can contact us. Our sever will check and let you know.

W3 Total Cache: You also don’t need to installed any caching plugin to improve the performance of your website. Inbuilt page caching is already enabled on our server with which website’s caching will be done at server level. Due to this your website will load 2X faster than a normal website.

WP Statistics: Normally users are installing such plugins to check the stats of their website. You don’t need to install such plugin as these options are already available in the cPanel.

If you don’t know how to check the statistics of website then you can take help from our step by step guide which will make it easy for you.

4) Install a Caching plugin:

We recommend you to enable a Caching plugin on your WordPress website. There are many Caching plugins are available such as WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.

These plugins can speed up your website. After installing these caching plugins your website’s loading speed will increase. These caching plugins saves a copy of your website’s content and everytime when anyone opens your website these plugins loads the website from their cache.

So that these caching plugins are helps you to reduce MySQL access, PHP requests, Resource usage of server and increase the loading speed of your website.

Note: If you are hosting your website with us then you don’t need to install such caching plugin as inbuilt page caching is already enabled on our server.

5) Use CDN to filter website’s traffic:

For increasing the loading speed of your website you can try a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for your WordPress. You can use Cloudflare as a CDN (Content Delivery Network).

Cloudflare works between your website and server. Once Cloudflare is enabled on your website then all the requests for your website will go through Cloudflare.

Cloudflare working on Caching. It saves the copy of your website on their server. Everytime you will request to open your website it will open through Cloudflare.

So by enabling cloudflare on your WordPress’s website all your wbsite’s traffic will be filtered by cloudflare. So the bots and bad requests from a single IP will be blocked by cloudflare.

If you don’t know how to setup cloudflare on your website then you can take help from our step by step guide which will make it easy for you.

6) Enable GZIP Compression:

You can also provide a compressed version of your website to all your Visitors. For that you need to enable GZIP compression. It saves a lot of bandwidth and other resources of server.

GZIP Compression is a feature in Apache servers which helps you to compress your website for loading it faster through your cPanel. But before enabling GZIP be sure that this feature is available in your hosting or not.

If this feature is not available in your cPanel then you can enable it from any caching plugin like W3 Total Cache plugin.

It compressed all the content of your website which helps your website to load fast. It compresses all the content at the backend but on the browsers the website will showing as it was designed. You can compress all the files present in your website like XML files, html files etc.

7) Maintain and Update WordPress Regularly:

This is most important to maintain and update WordPress regurlarly. Keep update your WordPress, Plugins and Themes. An outdated version of WordPress can be easily hacked by the hackers.

So it is important to update WordPress Plugins and themes. Updated version of WordPress is more optimized, faster and secure.

Also remove unwanted plugins and themes from your WordPress. Always use those plugins which are most important for your website. If you use many plugins in your WordPress then it will also affect your Website’s performance.

8) Optimize Images:

Normally images makes your website’s content more readable. If you have uploaded many images in your content then more visitors visits to your site. Images makes your website more effective and content more understandable.

But if you will upload many heavy images in your website then it can also slow down your website.

So it is always important to optimize your website’s images. You can install any plugin from WordPress library which will help you to optimize your WordPress website. By using such plugin all the images of your website will be compressed and the quality of images will remain same.

Once you will installed this plugin then it will help you to compress all you images and optimizing your WordPress website. Every new image you will upload will automatically compressed by such plugin.

Normally you can also optimize your WordPress website’s image with the help of plugins which will convert your image in best fit format by reducing the image size or resolution. These plugins compress the image size without loss in visibility quality which will also save your storage space and allotted bandwidth.

9) Stop Spam In Your WordPress:

Comment Spam is a serious issue and it can take a lot of space in your database which will affect your WordPress.

For stopping this comment spam you should enable the Captcha plugin on your WordPress. We recommend you to add CAPTCHA to WordPress comment and login form. This plugin will help you to stop comment spam on your WordPress.

Enabling Captcha plugin is very simple. You just need to register your website with your Gmail account then you will get API keys. You need to enter those keys in your installed Captcha plugin.

After doing this your Captcha plugin will be ready to use.

Moreover you can also configure and manage your WordPress comments by taking help from our step by step guide.

10) Disable Trackback and Pingback:

Trackback and Pingback both are used to get link notification from other blogs or websites on your new articles.

The difference between trackback and pingback is that trackback can create manually and pingback can only be creates through software. But both trackback and pingback are directly harming your website’s speed.

So it is most important to disable trackback & pingback in your WordPress. For disabling trackback and pingback you need to follow the following steps:

Step 1) Login to your WordPress.
Step 2) In settings click on Discussion.
Step 3) Under “Default article settings” untick trackback & pingback option.

11) Use CSS scripts:

Normally all the WordPress files are containing lots of unnecessary data with which the size of these files has been increases. So these files can take much time to load and slow down your website.

CSS files can help you to remove all the unnecessary data like extra spaces, Empty lines, comments etc from WordPress files with which the size of the files will be compressed and your website’s speed will increase.

You can create CSS files by yourself if you are expert in coding. But also there are many online tools available which will helps you to compress your WordPress files.

Moreover if you have installed W3 Total Cache plugin then it provides an option by which you can compress your theme’s CSS and JS files of your WordPress.

12) Database Optimization:

Database optimization is most important for running a WordPress website faster. For optimizing your WordPress database you need indexing. Indexing will help you to load your database fast on internet.

If you are an expert in running the queries then you can easily manage your database in PHPMyAdmin but if you are new in WordPress and don’t know much about WordPress then you can optimize database from the plugins like WP-Optimize etc.

These plugins can help you to manage all the spam Comments, Unapproved comments, trashed posts and saved drafts etc.

13) Split Comments Into Pages:

If you have much comments on your every post then it means that many visitors are visiting your website which is better for you. But these comments can slow down the speed of your website.

But you don’t worry. You can break down the comments into pages and increased the loading speed of your website.
You can break all the comments by follow the following steps.

Step 1) Login to your WordPress.

Step 2) Click on Discussion under settings option.

Step 3) Check the box in front of “Break comments into pages” under “Other comment settings”.

You can also set the limit of comments that how many comments you want to show on a page. You can set this limit from the drop down menu as shown.

That’s it. By using above mentioned steps you can easily optimize your WordPress.