WordPress Web Development | Tips To Optimize Your Website

Having slow website can be a deal breaker. It makes potential visitors leave even before the pages finish loading, getting you penalized in search results and lowering the amount of traffic. According to top WordPress web development experts, a good website should take only 2-3 seconds to load.

But the real question is, how do you achieve that?

The answer is the steps listed below. Read them carefully.

How To Know If Your Site Needs Optimization?

Very often, the owners aren’t aware that their websites need optimization. They don’t notice the slow loading time because their browsers have already made a cache of it, so they don’t experience it the same way as new visitors.

To see whether or not your WordPress site is up to the mark, use tools like Google PageSpeed Insight or GTmetrix. They will do a thorough analysis of the performance of the website and inform you about how long it takes to load.

If according to results, the loading time of website is 2-3 seconds, you’re doing well. Otherwise, do the following to brush it up.

Choose the Right Hosting Plan

A website can never perform well with slow hosting server. It’s impossible. Therefore, the first thing you should do to speed up your website is to move to a better hosting provider i.e. faster server.

However, hosting companies are not always the problem. Sometimes, you are with the right provider but still see poor performance, not because of the provider but the chosen plan – a shared one maybe?

Customers using shared plans often experience slow loading times because of thousands of websites being handled by the same server.

Therefore, you need to have a clear idea of what your website needs to run flawlessly. Do not be a Scrooge and take the cheap route. Go for a plan that handles your web requirements efficiently and keeps your website in the best shape.

Monitor Your Plugins

Firstly, do not overload the website with plugins. Keep the number of plugins as low as possible and use only those which are essential.

Though having a lower number of plugins won’t make a huge difference, it makes your website less vulnerable to malware and viruses.

Secondly, ensure that your plugins are supported by current WordPress version. The best practice to checking the plugin reliability is looking at reviews and ratings. Plugins with three stars or less might be poorly developed and should be avoided.

Optimize Images on The Site

Images are great for reducing text on websites and sharing articles on social media, however, they also consume a lot of space. Therefore, pages with large images often take a lot of time to load.

Optimize images before uploading them to your website for better performance. Image editing applications like Photoshop are the best way to do it.

WordPress plugins like Smush.it are also great to effectively optimize jpeg images and to convert GIF files into PNG. However, you should remember that these plugins use up a lot of resources while converting images and may slow down your website. Therefore, Photoshop is the only suitable option for image optimization.

Be Conscious About the Advertisements

The wrong choice of advertisements may increase loading time. Therefore, choose wisely what you allow and don’t allow on your site.

Third party advertisements can also slow down the website due to the communication taking place with external servers.

Of course, adds are necessary for websites to thrive, but all you need to do is find that right balance between performance and income to keep the visitors engaged.

These were some of the optimization tips to boost the speed of your site. With search engines putting so much emphasis on loading time, optimizing your website is no longer just an option – it’s a necessity. And the best part is that you don’t have to hire a web development expert to do that for you. All of this can be achieved on your own with just a bit of good knowledge easily available on the internet.

So, have a good time improving your site!