Many webmasters prefer building their blog over WordPress CMS for a simple fact that it’s simple and does not require any special skills to create a website. Once the backend setup is done, all that’s required is to add content consistently. With time the website starts becoming heavier with content, images, plugins, extensions and what not, of course with a view to enhancing reader experience.
Eventually, users start to realize a latency in the page load time hence giving rise to a chain of problems. So, how can one ensure that the site loads fast and easy everytimeit’s accessed by anyone from anywhere ?
Slow loading websites is a pain to everyone. Users tend to exist early from a website/page that takes longer to load when accessed. It’s recommended to check page load time on a regular basis using Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool. This should help you understand the areas where your website needs improvements with reducing the load time of your WordPress website (though any website can be checked using this tool).
In addition, it is recommended to follow certain practices and use the below tools to enhance loading speeds of your web pages.
Website Cache – Caching Plugin
Use W3 Total Cache, a free plugin for WordPress that ensures fast loading of your webpages. The plugin caches each aspect of your website pages by an optimized progressive rendering. With it you can ensure enhanced user experience by improving your server performance.
Optimizing and Correctly Display Images
“Images Speak Louder Than Words”, hence form one of the crucial segments of any website. But as a matter of fact, image files are heavier than text files. And if you have a WordPress based website that has too many images, you are sure to experience a slow loading time.
That’s ofcourse if you aren’t using an image optimization plugin such as WP-Smushlt. It’s free and can be easily installed to your WordPress website. One of the prime benefits of using such a plugin is that it greatly reduces the file size of the website keeping the image quality intact.
Database Optimisation
Optimizing your website database is not only crucial for your WordPress based website but for any other website. There are a number of free plugins available for WordPress that does the job quite well, namely : WP-Optimize, WP-DBManger, Revision Control. Using them one can schedule database optimization, reduce spam and optimize the database really well.
With a well optimised database, your rented web hosting server can respond to queries with a minimum delay hence making an overall difference to website speed.
Gzip and compress components
As the name suggests, it’s basically an application that helps with compressing data for your website. It compresses your website data (server-side), before sending it to the user, where the browser then decompresses the data locally before rendering it for users to view.
You may either choose to use a plugin called WordPress Gzip Compression or add the following code to .htaccess file of your WordPress website :
#Begin gzip and deflate
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/plain text/xml image/x-icon
</IfModule>
With this you can check if the Apache mod_deflate module exists over the server and if so, choose to serve HTML, CSS, Javascript, plain text, and favicon files using gzip compression.
For this to work, it is important that the website is hosted on an Apache web server wherein the mod_deflate module is enabled. Whereas, inorder to enable gzip compression for NGINX, it is important to have the below code included :
server {
gzip on;
gzip_types text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/plain text/xml image/x-icon;
}
Delete the Unwanted Plugins and Extensions from WordPress
If you’ve realized that any of the plugins are no longer useful for your website, it is suggested to better remove/delete them immediately. This is one of the factors that most webmasters overlook, but is one of the important factors governing website load times. So if you don’t want it what’s the point in keeping it, delete it and observe the difference.
Home page Optimisation
Unlike any internal pages, you might have observed a maximum traffic to your homepage. Therefore, it is important to have a well-optimized homepage for your WordPress based website. Use the below tweaks to optimize the page load time for your index page :
- Display excerpts of the posts instead of the entire article in the first place.
- Control the number of posts displayed over the home-page, the-minimum-the-better.
- Display image thumbnails instead of full-sized images over the homepage.
Enable “Optimise Website” Feature offered by cPanel
The benefit of having this feature enabled is, it ensures everything is gzipped when it is sent from the server to the client web browser.
Fast Web Hosting Server
Often users would blame the web hosting company for slow loading time of their website, but they needn’t always be the culprits. But yes, your site’s load time does depend on the kind of server it’s hosted upon. Having your website hosted over a high-configuration can greatly reduce the loading time of your website and offer one of the best experiences to your visitors.
Try these tips and tweaks yourself and observe changes in the load time for your website. If you need any help with it, please get in touch with our technical support department and we’ll do it for you at no additional charge.
