You have very little time to influence your visitor to stay on your website. If your website doesn’t load quickly, you will lose a user or a potential customer. The website visitor will close browser tab even before it loads if it takes a lot of time. You must optimize WordPress website for fast performance.
Following are few important tips to optimize the performance of your WordPress website.
1. Install WordPress Caching Plugin
All the pages created in WordPress are “dynamic”. This means they?re built on the fly every time someone visits a post or page on your website. To create your pages, WordPress has to run some database queries and some process to find the required information, put it all together, and then display it to your user.
This process of getting the data from the database and putting it together to build page can slow down your website. Caching plugin saves a copy of the page when it loads for the first time. Then when next time someone requests that page, a cached version is served to save a lot of time & server load.
You can use free caching plugins like “WP Super Cache” or “W3 Total Cache“. There are lot many other options as well. Most of them will work for your website.
If you are using managed WordPress hosting like “WP Engine“, you might not need caching plugin. They handle caching without the plugin and it works smoothly.
2. Optimize images used on the website
Size of images is one of the most important factors for your website’s load time. Lesser the total size of your images, lesser will be the load time for the website.
But, you should not skip using images on your website as they are an essential factor for engaging users with your website. So, it is very important to serve optimized images so that website doesn’t become heavy.
You can optimize your images online on sites like compressor.io. WordPress has an easy way for this as well. You can optimize?your images easily & automatically while uploading using free plugins like “WP Smush“.
3. Use good WordPress hosting
The hosting server is one of the most important parts of optimizing your WordPress website. The server should be fast & secure. It should respond quickly to the browsers’ requests.
Shared hosting can be little slower in this case. As they are shared by different websites, they must have many different abilities that your website might not need. There can be many software applications installed on the server that your website does not need.
You can go for some good hosting services like Digital Ocean where you get a droplet for a really low cost. Use this link and get $10 credit to start your scalable VPS. With such hosting, you install only required software applications on your server so that its memory is not wasted for unrequired apps.
Another better but bit costly option is to go for managed WordPress hosting. You can read more about its benefits here. It definitely helps you improve your website performance and security. Do consider using WPEngine as a managed hosting provider. We use it for all of our projects. Another good option for managed WordPress hosting is FlyWheel.
4. Remove unused plugins
5. Combine & Minify CSS, JS & HTML files
6. Use Content Delivery Network
7. Optimize WordPress Database
8. Update WordPress, Themes & Plugins regularly
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Very nicely written & a knowledgeable post. Making a blog SEO & User friendly like optimization of images, Meta tags, other media contents & informative blogs posts is also important. In the end, I would say thanks to the admin for sharing this with us.