WordPress is a powerful platform, however, it often suffers from speed issues. A majority of WordPress developers implement several practices on their site to boost up its speed. If your site is running slow, you should learn and implement the following effective strategies for accelerating its speed.
Using a Cache Plugin
If you have tens of thousands of subscribers and visitors that visit your site frequently, using a cache plugin is an effective idea. A caching plugin breaks your posts into smaller parts for its use and stores them on visitor’s browsers so that the loading time can reduce in future. As the result, visitors can view your pages in shorter time as their browsers will contain some parts of your site in caches.
Selecting an Effective Hosting Plan
If you aim to establish a heavy website but choose a cheap shared hosting plan without SSD to save a couple of dollars, you might regret your decision in future. Moreover, you should not get carried away by the marketing skills of a hosting provider and end up choosing a slow loading speed plan. Instead, you must analyze a hosting requirements and choose an appropriate hosting plan that offers a fair loading speed. Here, we suggest you to choose a SSD web hosting package to host your WordPress site.
Optimizing Images
Images consume a lot of space in your posts and slows down the loading speed. A majority of WordPress developers ignore the image optimization step while publishing a post, and hence their site loading speed gets affected. If you want to keep up with your site speed, it is important to compress and optimize your images. For this, you can use an efficient tool that will optimize the images automatically.
Avoiding Hotlinking Strategy
If you create images for your site, several websites might use your images by inserting its link in their posts. Known as hotlinking, it is a linking of your images on their site. Though you might consider it as a promotional strategy of your site, it actually increases loading speed on your server. When larger number of people open the image, your site loading speed increases drastically. As the result, your site loading speed slows down. Hence, you should avoid this strategy to speed up WordPress.
Using LazyLoad functionality
With the advanced functionalities in the internet world, loading speed can be boosted up by using LazyLoad. When you use this function, images load just before visitors reach a particular area of the post. This means that images will load only when a visitor scrolls down an article. The basic idea is quite simple: not all visitors read an article till its end so loading a page partially will improve loading speed while remaining images will load just before visitors view them.
Optimizing Homepage
Homepage is considered as one of the most important pages of every site. Two out of every three websites drive their visitors to a homepage through marketing strategies. Therefore, if your homepage doesn’t load quickly, a visitor might leave your site. To optimize your homepage, you can show an introducing paragraph of every article instead of full posts. Alternatively, you may cut down the number of posts to be showed on homepage. Moreover, you can remove widgets and plugins that are rarely used. This improves the loading speed and offers better layout after all visitors drive into your site for content.
Restricting Post Revisions Storage Amount
WordPress stores every revision you execute on every posts. This increases your site loading speed when you revise a post multiple times. For example, when you revise a post 6 times, all the revisions will be stored. However, you don’t require most of the initial revisions.
Hence, you can reduce the load on your WordPress site by limiting the storage of post revisions. When you limit your posts to 5 revisions storage, the earlier versions will be erased. This will increase your site loading speed in the long run.
Disabling Pingbacks and Trackbacks
.jpg)
Pingbacks and trackbacks have been ruling the list of SEO tactics for a long time. But the strategy has been trashed when developers discovered that it reduces loading speed. Your site is notified whenever any external website mentions your identity. This increases the data on your post, and correspondingly the loading speed. Therefore, you should disable pingbacks and trackbacks to speed up your WordPress site.
Optimizing Database
Your database plays a vital role in determining your site loading speed. If data on your site is dispersed, it will take much time in loading. But when you optimize the database and minimize its overhead, files are arranged properly.
In simple words, optimizing database in the online version of defragmenting your desktop where you arrange disk space and increase desktop’s speed. With that said, you can optimize database using a traditional method or use an effective plugin.
Using a Powerful Theme
Every visitor desires to land on a website having eye-soothing design and theme. There are tremendous numbers of WordPress themes to beautify your site, but some of them affect its loading speed. Therefore, you should choose and apply a speedy theme on your blog so that appearance can be enhanced without compromising its performance. The Twenty Eleven framework is a recommended example of such themes.
