The time your site takes to load influences how successful it will be in the future. If your website is slow, users will turn away in droves. They might even go to your competitors or click the back button before your website loads.

Not only speed will influence site performance but will also affect your rankings in search engines. Besides, to being ranked higher, many online business drivers report seeing an increase in search engine bots crawling after speeding up their design.

Today, we’ll discuss with you 8 quick tips on how you can decrease page loading time and optimize your site.

Before applying these tips to your site, check the speed of your website using a free performance service such as YSlow, Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix. You’ll get to know your website’s current speed.

1. Choose the Right Hosting Plan

First of all, choose the right host plan. You are fighting a lost battle if your server is taking ages to process MySQL commands and HTTP requests.

GTMetrix will suggest you of the exact response time of your server. Test the response time of your website against similar websites. For example, if you run an e-commerce store, see how your server response time compares to other e-commerce stores similar to your niche.

Not always the Hosting companies are at fault. Your hosting plan can affect the speed, too. Businesses using shared hosting plans are more likely to face slow loading times as plenty of websites get hosted on the same server.

However, any type of hosting plan will suffer from CPU throttling and insufficient RAM. So, you need to know what your site needs to run smoothly and choose a plan that can handle traffic spikes effectively.

2. Use a Fast WordPress Theme

A badly coded design and faulty images will add insignificant weight to your web page. It’s common for some WordPress themes to be a few megabytes in size, which could add a few seconds to your page loading time.

Choose a design optimized for tablets, mobile devices and desktops for making your website. Search engines favour enticing and responsive designs because they ensure all pages have the same URL.

Beside, designs created specifically to work on mobiles can improve a mobile user’s experience significantly.

Unfortunately, most theme designers optimize their theme demo website using caching and content delivery networks, which makes is difficult to know how quick a WordPress design is on real time basis.

3.Monitor Your Plugins

Before installing any plugin on your website, ensure its significance.

Plugins are one of the biggest causes of a slow internet site. More unnecessary plugins will hamper your website’s performance. But, if you know everything about the plugins you are using on your site, they can enhance your site’s speed, too.

There are various reasons for a website slow speed including calls to external servers, bad coding and persistent calls and updating of your WP database. Always, keep an eye on how much CPU power plugins use, too. Your whole server can go down if the plugins you are using on your website can bottleneck your CPU due to persistent processes.

4. Optimize Your Images for the Web

Images can help your articles be shared more frequently on social media services and can help break up long pieces of text; However, they also take up a lot of your storage. The pages that contain multiple images can take additional time to load.

So, optimize your images for the web before uploading them to your site. Many photo editing applications, like Photoshop, allow you to do this via the “Save for The Web” option.

You can also use WP Smush.it plugin. It utilizes the Smush.it API strip meta data from JPEGs, optimize JPEG images and convert GIF (images) to PNG. You should, however, be aware that the plugin uses up a lot of resources when it is converting images. Therefore your website may be slow while it is running.

If you do not want to sacrifice image quality, check out Lazy Load. It ensures that images load when the area becomes visible to the user and will help significantly reduce page loading times.

5. Reduce Post Revisions, Spam, Drafts, Trackbacks and Pingbacks

Not only trash can increase the size of your database, but all posts on your website can populate table rows with data. So, it is crucial to delete unwanted pingbacks & trackbacks and spam comments regularly.

Also, be wary of the number of posts and drafts revisions your website has recorded. You can use WordPress revision system that allows you to go back to older versions of articles and view or restore them.

By doing this, will autosave of your pages as well as revisions will get generated each time you save an article. It means that a post with five revisions will take up five times as much room on your database than the published price. It enhances your database’s size considerably.

6. Minify and Combine CSS and Javascript

Each call to your Javascript and CSS files is an HTTP request, which means when someone lands on your site, their device sends a request for a file and then the server process and sends it back. More requests will increase the time for your pages to load.

The PHP5 application Minify merges various Javascript and CSS files into a single file. It reduces the number of HTTP requests significantly. Also, the app removes unwanted whitespace and comments.

Several WP plugins are available that will minify your CSS and Javascript files. Try either Better WordPress Minify or WP Minify.

7. Install a Cache Plugin

A good and effective Caching plugin allow you to publish static HTML files instead of dynamic files and helps you increasing the page loading speed as there are no MySQL or PHP commands to execute.

Also, caching features include caching of feeds, minification, Content Delivery Network (CDN) support, Gzipping and much more.

Installing a cache plugin is an effective way of enhancing your page loading times. Some of the most popular caching plugins include W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, etc.

8. Enable Gzip Compression

Enabling Gzip compression on your website lets a website page to get transferred to a browser at up to 70% of its original size. The browser will further decompress the page and display it to the visitors.

You can enable it via the WordPress admin page or control panel. To enable Gzip, simply replace the value of GZIP field from 0 to 1.

End-Note

Speeding up your site is no longer just an option. With search engines preferring the speedy website, it is crucial to have less loading time for a successful online presence.

People prefer going to the developers when 99% of optimizing your website is following good practices. Follow the above tips to enhance your website’s speed and share with us your techniques to improve the speed and performance.

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