At the present time, more and more small business owners and are searching for ways to speed up their WordPress websites. As a matter of fact, faster loading pages will result in better user experience, SEO boost and increased sales. According to recent studies, over 47 percent of customers expect a website to load within two seconds or less. Moreover, 40 percent of consumers will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. In this blog post, you will find ways how to speed up WordPress website:
Choose High-Performance WordPress Hosting
In reality, shared hosting provide slow performance compared to VPS-based WordPress hosting. Choosing standard web hosting plans, you share the server resources with other websites. In general, shared hosting even with unlimited bandwidth can not provide fast performance. Most of businesses choose web hosting in order to save money. However, faster website can increase your customers and revenue with ease. See our WordPress VPS hosting plans and solutions with included cPanel for free.
Select Fast WordPress Theme
Besides hosting, you should choose a fast and lightweight WordPress theme. You will find lots of free and paid WordPress themes to choose from. Markedly, it’s recommended to avoid frameworks with tons of features that you do not need will lead to slower WP website performance. You should check WP theme performance and select the fastest loading framework, especially if you use shared hosting.
Check WordPress Plugins
In fact, there are lots of WordPress plugins available to extend the functionality of your website. However, too many plugins can slow down your WordPress site performance. This is why you should pay attention not only on the number of plugins, but on their quality. Moreover, you need to make sure that you deactivate and remove all unnecessary WP plugins. In addition, do not forget to check if WP plugins conflict with each other or your WordPress theme.
Install Caching Plugin
Again, WordPress plugins can be very useful tools, especially if you need to deal with caching. In reality, WordPress plugin make complex things easier. Fortunately, most of caching plugins are free and easy to use. For example, you can choose W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin. It is super easy to use; you just need to install and activate, and your page will load faster.
Optimize Images
As can be seen, images can boost engagement. Recent studies show that people 80% more likely to read your content with images. Despite this fact, if you do not optimize your images, they will affect your website performance. This is one of the most common mistakes for WordPress sites. First of all, you can reduce the image size before uploading them to your website. There are lots of free image optimization software. Alternatively, you can use the image optimization WP plugin in order to optimize images automatically.
Update WordPress
How to speed up WordPress website? In addition, you should not forget to update WordPress, WP theme, plugins and PHP. Latest updates may include innovate features, bug fixes, increased security and speed improvements. No wonder, it is so important to update your WordPress, plugins, and PHP to the latest versions in order to keep up with latest technologies. Before making any updates, make sure that you back up your WordPress site.
For more insights, you can read about The Benefits of VPS Hosting for Web Development and The Importance of Choosing the Right Server Location for Your VPS.