If you are doing SEO on your WordPress website, fast loading is vital. In this blog, we will discuss all the possible ways to speed up your WordPress website according to chatGPT. We will include some tips and tricks, some plugin names, and some settings to change.
Key Strategies for Boosting Your WordPress Site’s Performance and Speed in 2023
Table of Contents
Must Use Fast and Reliable Web or WordPress Hosting
A fast and reliable hosting provider is essential to speed up your WordPress website. It provides better security and fast data loading speed, and as a side result, your website could handle more traffic and run much more effectively.
We would like to recommend Hostinger as a website hosting service. It is known for its fast and reliable services and also better pricings. You should check it out before choosing another hosting provider in India.
Use CDN to Decrease Server Response Time
CDN(content delivery network) is the best way to reduce server response time, mainly when your website contains some big-sized video, images, or other media. Generally, by using CDN, you distribute your data to multiple servers, drastically reducing your website’s response time.
Use Caching Plugin
You can significantly reduce your WordPress website loading time by using a caching plugin such as WP super catch or W3 total catch. These plugins can help you clear the cache data, which reduces the excess data and help your website load faster.
Optimize Your Website Images
Having big-sized or large images is one of the most common reasons to slow down your website loading time. To speed up your WordPress website speed, you have to reduce your image size without sacrificing the quality.
Ultimately, all a user sees is a visual, not file size, so using high-quality but low-in-size images is essential.
Make Your CSS and Javascript Files Smaller and Combine Them
Reducing the size of your website’s CSS and Javascript files can significantly improve your website’s speed by up to 30-50%. When a user visits your website, CSS and Javascript load from your web server.
That’s why the smaller your Javascript and CSS size will be without affecting the functionality, the faster your pages load.
A few plugins, such as WP Rocket and autoptimize, can help you compress your files enough to load faster and remove unnecessary codes like comments or useless spaces.
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Use Lazy Loading to Load Images Faster
Lazy loading is a technique that can use to improve your image loading speed by deferring the loading of images until they are needed. In other words, images will only carry the load if they are in a user’s viewport.
You can use several plugins to do this technique on your WordPress website, such as Lazy Load by WP Rocket, BJ Lazy Load, etc.
Read more reasons to use WordPress CMS for your website.
Delete Unnecessary Plugins
Regarding WordPress plugins, you should always consider quality over quantity. WordPress plugins are like the software of your websites. And running too many of them at a time can positively impact your website speed.
Even though it is not visible or you are not using it, there is a slim chance that the plugin will run in the background and consume your website’s resources.
Use small-sized WordPress themes.
Sometimes just like unnecessary plugins, themes place an undue burden on your web servers. Many themes have high-quality, large images and CSS and Javascript codes to give more functionality and great looks.
But these things can make your website’s loading speed slow. Instead, you can use lightweight themes with little to no unnecessary codes. Using custom CSS and different plugins, you can add more effects and functionality later.
Try Disabling Pingbacks And Trackbacks
Your WordPress website may run faster if pingbacks and trackbacks are disabled since fewer requests and notifications are sent and received.
Here are the steps on how you can disable pingbacks and trackbacks:
- Log in to your admin panel.
- Click on “Settings” and go to “Discussion.”
- Scroll down to “Default article settings.”
- Uncheck the boxes next to “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article” and “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles.”
- Scroll down to the bottom and click on “Save Changes.”
Always Use Lightweight Social Sharing Plugins
While selecting a social sharing plugin, choose small-sized plugins with almost zero impact on the website’s performance. By using popular social sharing plugins such as AddToAny, Simple Share Button Adder, etc., you can limit the number of sharing buttons; Having too many of them can make your WordPress website load speed very slow.
Use Responsive Themes
A responsive theme can help your website’s loading time in many ways. Responsive themes are designed for mobile, desktop, and all devices; by using a responsive theme, you can optimize your website for mobile users, which can give them better user engagement, and your WordPress website will load faster on all devices as well.
Moreover, a responsive website has optimized codes, which load quickly. This can help your website increase performance. In addition, a responsive website is becoming the most vital ranking factor in 2023.
Disable Hotlinking of Your Images
Generally, hotlinking occurs when a website is directly linked to an image on your WordPress website. It causes your server to have extra bandwidth to the server for visitors. This slows down the time it takes for your website to load and consumes resources.
Paginate Posts
Pagination is dividing a lengthy page into multiple pages. It also helps to improve readability and performance.
For instance, you can divide a post into multiple chapters to make processing easier in chunks.
Clean Up Your Media Library
Another way to speed up your WordPress website is to remove unused or default media from the library. To remove new media from the library, you can use plugins like Media Cleaner, etc.
Use a dedicated server.
Suppose you have an e-commerce website on WordPress; your website has to deal with a lot of traffic daily. Moving to a dedicated server rather than shared hosting is advisable in that case.
Website uptime is crucial, but sometimes shared hosting can cause trouble. That’s why a whole server can significantly speed up your WordPress website.
Try to Limit Redirects
Disaster happens, we understand. You need to rearrange the site structure whenever you delete a post or a page. Still, always try to reduce the number of redirects on your WordPress website.
Each redirect adds an extra bit of loading time. Especially your website has multiple redirects that send visitors to one or another page.
WebP is a Better Alternative to PNG and JPEG
WebP – the ultimate image format for speed and quality. While PNG and JPEG have long been popular choices for web images, they can’t compete with the power of WebP.
Why? Because WebP lossless images are smaller, they also maintain the same high-quality visuals that your visitors crave. By switching to WebP, you can significantly reduce page size and load times, resulting in a faster and smoother user experience.
In 2023, speed matters more than ever before. So if you want to boost your WordPress website and keep visitors happy, switch to WebP today.
If you want in-depth detail about why WebP is better than any other image format, click here.
Maintain the WordPress Database by Cleaning It
Are you tired of your WordPress website’s slow load times and sluggish performance in 2023? Cleaning up your database is one of the simplest and most effective ways to speed things up.
While databases are designed to improve accessibility, they can quickly become cluttered with unnecessary data like old drafts, spam comments, and outdated records. You can ensure your site runs efficiently by scheduling regular database cleanups and optimizations.
Plenty of excellent WordPress database plugins are available to help with this task. We highly recommend WP-Optimize and Advanced Database Cleaner for their ease of use and effectiveness.
Don’t let a cluttered database slow you down in 2023. Clean things up and watch as your site’s speed and performance soar.
Use Excerpt on Homepage
WordPress themes vary in their use of experts on the homepage. They display the complete post content instead. The performance of some blogs kinds or businesses may benefit from this, but others may not.
You must go to Settings >> Reading to display excerpts on the homepage. Then click “Summary” under “For each article in a feed.”
Avoiding Direct Video Uploads to WordPress
Directly uploading your films to WordPress can also significantly speed up loading. This is particularly concerning because now hosting movies can be costly regarding bandwidth. You might have to pay a large sum to your hosting provider, who might even decide to shut down your website.
You could still face severe consequences even if you pay for unlimited bandwidth. Hosting videos will increase the backup size and make restoration much more challenging.
But assistance is available. Instead, you can embed videos posted to websites like YouTube, which have the necessary bandwidth. Then, copy and paste the URL into the article, which will be smoothly incorporated, preventing slow load times and punishment.
Reduce External HTTP Requests
In 2023, every second counts regarding your WordPress website’s speed and performance. One of the most effective ways to speed things up is by cutting down on external HTTP requests.
While it’s helpful to use files from other sites, overloading your site with requests can seriously impact load times. You can take a few simple steps to reduce the number of requests and boost performance. One option is to disable some scripts and styles, while another is to merge them into a single file.
Minification is another key strategy for speeding up your site. This process removes unnecessary characters from HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files, reducing load times and boosting performance. And the best part? It won’t lead to any unwanted results or affect your site’s appearance.
Utilise GZIP Compression
After exploring ways to speed up WordPress, many computer owners compress files on their machines to conserve disc space. GZIP compression, which lowers bandwidth consumption and speeds up user access to your site, serves as this for WordPress users.
It indicates that your website is unzipped before a user enters it. You can compress your files using one of the many available plugins or edit your htaccess file to include the following code.
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/HTML
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/XML
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/CSS
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/XML
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
Limit Post-Revisions
Post changes can take up a significant amount of space in your database, and some experts believe they negatively affect plugin database queries. Plugins that don’t exclude revisions might perform unnecessary revision searches.
However, it’s relatively simple to restrict the number of changes retained for each item. You may accomplish this by adding the code define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS,’ 4); to your wp-config.php file, which will cause prior revisions to be rejected and only the last four to be saved.
There are choices if you’d like to use a plugin for post revisions. To prevent your backend from becoming clogged with outdated draughts that you no longer need, you may choose how many modifications to save and roll back to earlier versions if mistakes are made. This plugin is called Revision Control.
Plan Background Activities Depending on Traffic Intensity
As a webmaster, you can plan background chores to run your website. Updates, security checks, backups, and routine operations are just a few examples. However, these operations may hurt server performance, increasing website load times.
It is recommended to perform these operations when there is less traffic on the WordPress site. This keeps your server from becoming overloaded while providing peak performance when required. Additionally, use a traffic analysis tool to determine when little traffic is on your website and schedule jobs accordingly.
Install a Website Firewall at the DNS Level
A DNS-level website firewall can help you keep hostile actors away from your site. These firewalls are generally adjusted to prevent brute-force attacks. However, when attempting to access the website, these attacks impact server performance and can result in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.
Website firewalls that operate at the DNS level, like Cloudflare or Sucuri, can help shield your site from hackers who may even attempt these attacks. 10Web provides CloudFlare support.
FAQs
Why do I need to speed up my WordPress website?
For a better user experience, improve conversion rate, and to increase keyword rankings. However, fast loading speed is a very important ranking factor.
What are some common reasons for a slow WordPress website?
- Large image sizes
- Bloated plugins and themes
- Outdated software
- Poor hosting
- Lack of caching
How does lazy loading help my website load faster?
When using lazy loading, unnecessary resources like photos, videos, and iframes are loaded after the user has requested them. This speeds up the website and reduces loading time initial page load time.
How does website loading speed help in SEO?
The user experience is strongly impacted by website loading speed, making it an important SEO component. Better user experiences on fast-loading websites can increase engagement, decrease bounce rates, and eventually improve search engine results.
Conclusion
Speeding up your WordPress website in 2023 is not just a matter of convenience – it’s necessary. With more and more users expecting fast load times and seamless performance, taking proactive steps to optimize your site is essential.
You can significantly improve your site’s speed and performance by implementing the tips and tricks we’ve covered in this post. These strategies make a real difference, from optimizing images and cleaning up your database to cutting down on external HTTP requests.
If you need any website-related assistance, whether it is about technologies or errors, we at InfoPhonix Digital are happy to help.
