7 ways to speed up your WordPress site

WordPress is a great way to build your website, unfortunately, most websites built-in WordPress are slow. Since a slow website is a frustration for potential customers, we have developed seven ways that you can speed up your WordPress website.

Why is speed important?

When a potential visitor comes to your website you only have a few seconds to get their attention. So when the website loads slower, the chances are very high that the visitor will leave your website. With a slow website, you not only lose customers but also your place in the Google ranking. This is because the Google algorithm also evaluates websites based on their loading speed. So let's solve this problem!

Ways to speed up your website

Lightweight theme

If you are going to choose a theme, it is very important that you look closely and analyze whether there are any delaying components. Beautiful elements often use an unnecessary amount of CSS formatting and scripts. You can easily scan the demo theme with Google Pagespeed Insights to see if they score well. Lightweight themes are therefore much faster because they have no useless functions. Please contact us for the best WordPress themes.

Image size

High-quality photos require a lot of MBS and the loading time of a website gets worse quickly. That is why it is good to compress images. There are various plugins that can help you achieve that. We work a lot with TinyPNG this website and WordPress plugin ensures that an image is considerably reduced without compromising on quality.

Caching plugins

Caching saves files temporarily. When you visit a website for the first time, your browser caches active data. So when you visit the website again, the browser has already cached a large part of the data, which reduces the loading time by half. There are many caching plugins for speeding up a website available. At GiddyUp - web design company in South Africa, we use WP Rocket often and are satisfied with that, but our advice is to always tackle website speed optimization in the source and then possibly use WP Rocket as an extra.

WordPress database

All information about your website and the users is stored in the WordPress database. If this database collects too much information, it may delay your website. This is why you have to delete unwanted data, such as spam responses, revisions, and unused accounts.

Disable

Pingbacks and trackbacks WordPress contains the pingbacks and trackbacks functionality that indicates when your blog post or website receives backlinks. This is switched on as standard and ensures a continuous connection with your server. You can disable this, it has no effect on your backlinks and your WordPress website speeds up a bit.

Lazy Load Images

With Lazy Load images, you ensure that images are loaded when they come into view from the page visitor. The images are only shown when you scroll down on the web page. It shortens the loading time, which in turn speeds up the WordPress website. Lazy Load by WP Rocket is a tool with which you can try to make it.

Minimizing JS and CSS

If you use the Google PageSpeed ​​Insight tool to test your website, you may already know what to do to minimize CSS and JS file sizes. By minimizing the file size, you actually reduce the number of JS and CSS calls. This will greatly improve the website loading time. There are many plugins available that help you easily shrink both files.

And last but not least

Improving the speed of your WordPress website can offer many benefits. It is important that your optimizations are not at the expense of the user experience of your website. Optimize what is necessary and do not compromise your website.

Do you need help to improve the speed of your website? Then contact us GiddyUp, create affordable website design Cape Town.