The biggest advantage of lowering your website’s loading time is that it will help tremendously in improving site’s usability and user experience which is essential for today’s online business.
There are many ways to get started with top-end optimization. Here are 5 ideas to get you going.
1. Get a good Web Host
The major factor that influences the speed of a website is the hosting of your WordPress website. I have used many servers but the best option in terms of speed and service is without a doubt SiteGround. They provide excellent loading speed and customer support guaranteed 24/7.
2. Use an effective catching plugin
WordPress pages are “dynamic.” This means they’re built on the fly every time someone visits a post or page on your website. To build your pages, WordPress has to run a process to find the required information, put it all together, and then display it to your user. A cache plugin generates static pages and improves the site pagespeed 2-5x faster. The cached pages are stored in the memory and when a user makes a request the pages are delivered from the cache. By this the php execution and the database requests are skipped. There are a lot of good WordPress caching plugins available, but I recommend using either WP Fastest cache (free) or LiteSpeed Cache (free) plugin. WP Fastest Cache was rated the #1 (free) cache plugin in this Facebook poll.
3. Compress your images
According to httparchive, in August 2016 the images are more than 64% of the weight of an average website. Usually they tend to weigh more than all of your CSS, JS and HTML combined! If you have a website with lots of images you must optimize them to reduce the size. By reducing the image size, you´ll reduce web page size overall and save server´s bandwidth. There are multiple ways to optimize the images, but doing without losing quality is the smart way. In this article, I’ve covered three types of tools.
Compressor
Compress and reduce your image size up to 90% with Compressor while maintaining high-quality resolution. It supports JPEG, PNG, GIF & SVG and files size limit is 10 MB.
Or any online tool that resizes images, like Bulk Resize
WebP Express
WebP is a raster image format from Google that’s designed specifically for the web. It provides lossless and lossy compression that allows web designers to show richer images at smaller file sizes. WebP lossy images use predictive coding to encode the image. It reduces the file sizes by looking at the neighboring pixels to predict the values, and then only encodes the differences. Lossy images are up to 34% smaller than the comparable image as a JPEG and 26% than the same as PNG.
4. Avoid using unnecessary plugins
Excess plugins can make your job harder and more complicated than it needs to be and could affect the performance as well as the security of a website. Actually, many times we have installed and activated plugins that we do not even know what they do or how to configure them. So why do we have them there without doing anything consuming resources?
5. Keep your site up-to-date
WordPress is updated frequently. Each update will not only offer new features but it will also fix security issues and bugs. Your WordPress theme and plugins may have regular updates, too. As a website owner, it’s your responsibility to keep your WordPress site, theme, and plugins updated to the latest versions. Not doing so may make your site slow and unreliable, and make you vulnerable to security threats.
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