For a website to be successful you need a good design, functionality and performance. Loading speed of a website is part of its performance. For any website or blog you need a fast-loading time for it to be searched easily by Google and users find it valuable and useful. Loading time of a website is covered in SEO and there are few basic steps you should take care of so that your website loads faster.
If your website is loading slow it will have a bad impression on visitors and they are more likely to leave your website. Even search engines like Google consider the page speed as the ranking factor. So, if your website has poor speed performance then you are less likely to be discovered organically.
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You can check your website speed score at Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, WebPageTest, and Pingdom tools.
Target of a website loading should be under 3 seconds. If your website is slow and loading up in more than 3 seconds then you should take care of certain tips, we are sharing to increase the website speed.
1. Theme
With WordPress you need to use a theme for your website to work rest things like adding plugins comes later. Theme of a website is the baseline and decides the size of your website, which controls the overall speed of your website. So, it's best practice to spend quality time finding the right theme and to test each theme before deciding which one to use.
There are so many themes available in the market for WordPress and choosing the right theme will decide the loading speed of your website. Go for lightweight and popular themes available. Some examples are GeneratePress, Astra are perfect lightweight theme for your project.
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2. Hosting
The place where you are hosting your website decides its speed. Whether you host your website in a private or public ISP such as Google or Microsoft it can have an enormous impact on the speed of your website. Some hosting providers will also offer you special features to speed up your website.
It's natural we always want to save money when we can but spending money on a good hoster should be your top priority. It's a fundamental investment on a quality hosting server to get a proper speed of your website. Hosting decides how much faster your software will work. Example like Hostinger is a fast and secure web hoster. Your server should provide you with good speed at an affordable price. Also, they should have a 24/7-hour support system.
3. Cache Plugin
Cache strategies involve storing assets on the user's browser so that there is no need to download again and again between browser and server. There are many good plugins available for WordPress like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. Cache Plugin is used to hide performance issues and helps WordPress to work more efficiently. By using Cache, you increase the website loading time resulting in a happier visitor.
You first focus on website speed improving is Theme and Hosting only after that you can look for a good Cache Plugin.
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4. Optimize Images
Optimization images will compress them to the smallest possible size without compromising their quality. Image makes up most of the webpage size, which makes them a key contributor of page loading speed. Reducing the size of images will decrease the total weight of the webpage, which is crucial in making the page load faster and correctly.
There are many plugins available for WordPress to optimize the images, for example Smush image compression and optimization plugin. If you don't want to use plugin for this work, you can manually compress the image in online application like TinyPNG and after compressing the image then upload it to your website.
5. Minify JS and CSS
Websites have files of JavaScript (JS), and cascading style sheets (CSS) which makes the website functional. Properly combining and minifying JS and CSS will help you to increase its loading speed and result in better user experience. Minifying CSS or JS files will simply remove the unnecessary parts of code which help to load the page faster. Increase in speed will result in better SEO hence more organic visitors.
Bonus Tip
Use CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers located at different locations in the world, they work together to speed up your website performance. If your website target visitors from different locations in the world then using CDN will shorten the distance between server and user and increase your page speed. A CDN will run your website from the closest server available, reducing the number of external HTTP requests. One example of CDN is Cloudflare.