7 Tips For Making Your WordPress Website Run Faster

Website loading speed is of paramount importance. It has a direct influence on the customer satisfaction levels, conversion rate, the chances of visitors returning, and even the chances of your website ranking well in the search engines.

WordPress is a highly streamlined and properly maintained platform. When issues arise, they almost always come down to the fact that hardly anybody uses the plain WordPress installation any longer. To get your desired results, you are likely to use third-party themes, custom code, or plugins that can all reduce your website’s speed.

What can you do to remedy the situation? Here are seven effective tips we at Rise Atlantic Web Design have put together for making your WordPress website faster:

1. Use the Right Web Hosting

Web hosting is one of the most seemingly obvious solution to making your WordPress website faster, but unfortunately is one of the most overlooked factor.

Using a sharing hosting provider might seem like a good idea, but it tends to deliver poorer performance since your website will be sharing server space with numerous other websites and it is impossible to tell the amount of resources used by other sites.

If you would like to enhance your WordPress website speed, your topmost priority should be to find the best hosting. It is better to pay extra and enjoy premium hosting services especially if you have a business that relies on the speed and uptime of your website.

2. Database Optimization

All databases eventually deteriorate as time goes by. The worse the code on your WordPress website, the sooner your database will deteriorate. Larger databases tend to take up more RAM and slow down queries, which leads to longer processing times that can add as much as 10 seconds to loading times.

You can use the amazing built-in tools available in MySQL to repair/correct database issues, or you can use readily available plugins to do it. Whatever approach you choose, the important thing is to ensure that your database is properly optimized.

3. Use the Right Theme

When it comes to WordPress themes, not all of them are made equal. Some themes are developed by professionals while others are developed by novices without any experience. The difference between a fast and a slow theme is what is in the code.

Slow themes usually run bloated plugin libraries under the guise of being user-friendly. It is thus important to use the right theme since it can make or break your WordPress site since it can determine how slow or fast your website runs or loads.

4. Update Your Themes and Plugins

Keeping the themes and plugins on your WordPress website updated is a critical task that should be regularly carried out to ensure that your website is secure. However, as the developers improve and update these items, chances are that they will be optimized to improve the loading times.

If you wish to make your WordPress website load/run faster, it is thus important to keep your eye on it to ensure that all its components (plugins and themes) are up to date including the core WordPress software itself.

5. Optimize Your Images

Images are what attracts people to your website, and it is impossible to do without them especially on the WordPress platform. The platform does its best to serve optimized images, but it cannot do some things. It is advisable to optimize all your images before uploading them using software like Photoshop.

Today, image editors actually allow you to choose the JPEG quality that you desire, so you should use the lowest possible setting. In most cases, it is impossible to notice the difference between 100 percent and 60 percent quality, but the size of the file could be cut by half if not more.

6. Uninstall or Deactivate Plugins

Keeping any unwanted or outdated plugins on your WordPress website tends to add a lot of junk to your web files. It also increases the size of your backup and puts an overwhelming load on the server while the backup files are being generated.

It is advisable to get rid of any outdated or unwanted plugins that you no longer use and try finding alternate methods to use third-party services for scheduling or automating tasks such as sharing posts to social media platforms.

7. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Visitors to your WordPress website come from different locations throughout the world, and the website loading speed is likely to differ if visitors are located too far away from the location where your website is hosted. This is why you need a CDN to reduce the loading speed for visitors from different countries.

A CDN maintains a copy of your website in different data centers located in different locations throughout the world. Its primary function is to serve web pages to visitors from the nearest location possible. The most popular CDN services are MaxCDN and CloudFlare.

The Bottom Line

The website loading/running speed is something you need to pay attention to and ensure that it is as fast as possible. Having a lower loading time significantly helps to improve the experience of your visitors, which translates to other benefits such as increased conversions, better customer satisfaction rates, and even how well your website ranks on the search engines, among other benefits.

The 7 tips provided here are guaranteed to increase the loading/running speed of your WordPress website. The best thing about them is that they only require minimum technical skill and a minimal amount of time to implement and can translate to shorter loading times and you can enjoy the benefits associated with that.  Remember if your having trouble getting your speeds up its best to hire an SEO Company, they understand how much this effects rankings were as a web design company may not

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