How to Optimize Your WordPress Website for Speed?

The uber-connected consumer is all about speed. A website, application, or any digital asset with more response time loses the viewers’ attention immediately. This can mean a major loss of prospective business for enterprises. Even from the SEO point of view, search engines consider the loading time of websites while determining their page rank and SEO score. Typically, a website should take two seconds or less to load. So, if your website takes longer to load, then it’s probably an indication to get it optimized right away. And with 31% websites being built on WordPress, the contention of speed is mostly with respect to WP sites.

Here are a few easy ways to optimize the speed of your WordPress website

Find the right hosting partner

In the current tech landscape, one can confidently say that a website is only as good as its hosting. Your hosting platform is where your website lives and breathes and it needs to be of quality. The best WordPress hosting solution will help contribute to better site speed, page response time, and easily handle traffic spikes making your WP site perform its best.

Use only quality plugins and themes

A good WordPress site uses the best themes and advanced plugins. But to make tools effective enough, you must ensure that all plugins and themes that you install are of high quality and come from trusted sources.

Stay updated

Keeping your plugins, themes, and the WP version updated regularly can help maintain the desired site speed. Make sure that you don’t ignore an update alert and upgrade your WP core whenever needed.

Implement Caching

Caching helps reduce the number of requests that your WP website handles, by storing it in a temporary location. So, every time a site visitor requests information, your system does not have to access the main server, thus reducing the page load time considerably.

Optimize images

The visual appeal of a website is instrumental in  attracting visitors but if that creativity slows down the site, the entire exercise becomes futile. To manage this, you can easily optimize all images used on the website by resizing, reducing, and compressing images using various tools. WP plugins like WP Smush, Imsanity, Imagify etc. allow you to compress images without losing their quality.

Integrate a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

This is more applicable for websites which are heavy on images and videos. Using a Content Delivery Network lets you store all your data and media files across smaller servers spread across the network. So if your visitor is geographically remote from your system, they can easily access the server closest to them, thus reducing loading time and improving site speed.

Clean Up

Just like you periodically clean up your computing system, you also need to clear out your WordPress system from time to time. Remove any unused themes or unwanted plugins, outdated images or videos that have been piling up in the media library but are rarely used. Data build up over time can cause your site to slow down and cleaning up sooner can help. 

There are more such ways to optimize speed for a WordPress website but the above ones are the most common methods. And if done right, these ways can boost your site’s speed and performance making it rank well on search engines.