WordPress
is a great platform that help entrepreneurs to set up a website or a
blog easily. However, your WordPress website can at times become very
slow, which can have a negative impact on your conversions. While
slow and steady definitely wins the race, this is not the case with
your website. A slow website can turn off your visitors in turn
making you lose your potential clients. So if you feel that your
WordPress business website is also becoming slow, it is always better
to take the right precautions.
Importance
Of The Website Loading Speed
First
impression matters a lot and when it comes to making a favorable
impression on your prospective customers, loading speed of the
website plays an important role. When an online user visits your
website, the first thing that he will notice is the speed of the
website.
Generally
a visitor stays on a page for about 3 to 4 seconds before moving on
to some other website. If your website is not able to load properly
during that time, the visitors will definitely move on. Even if you
have a well-designed website equipped with attractive content, it
will fail to attract visitors' attention. Moreover, if your website
loads slowly, it will be ranked lower in the Google search result.
This
post lists put different ways to increase the performance of your
WordPress website. So make sure to include these tips while carrying
out WordPress optimization to increase the performance of your
business website.
Start
From The Basics
If
you want to increase the performance of the site, the most important
thing would be to start with the basics. Starting with the basic
would include:
- Plugins
Remember
to keep the number of plugins low. A website that is equipped with a
large number of plugins has high loading speed and this is something
that you do not want. So make a careful choice of the plugins and
make sure that you use only those plugins that are most essential.
- Spam Comments
Another
factor that can decrease the speed of your website is the presence of
spam comment in your database. So make sure that you regularly delete
the spam comments to optimize your WordPress website.
- Post Revisions
Copies
of old revisions can also make the database heavy further having a
negative effect on the speed of your website. To delete all the old
revisions, you can install a WordPress plugin and increase the speed
of your website.
Choose
A Good Host
While
you may think that investing in a shared hosting provider is a good
choice, think again. It may seem to be the best bargain deal,
however, choosing a shared host come with its share of downsides. A
site hosted on shared host have incredible slow speed and cannot
handle heavy traffic flow.
So
if you have started your website on a shared host, try to upgrade it
as soon as possible. You can choose the WP Engine managed WordPress
hosting to avoid your website from having downtime. By upgrading your
web host, you will be glad that you did.
Carefully
Choose A Theme
Now
that you have worked with the web host and plugins, the next
important step is to choose a theme wisely. Instead of choosing a
theme, start with a solid framework for added benefits to your
website.
After
selecting a framework, see how frequently it is updated, what are the
security measures and what kind of designs will you get. To increase
the performance of your website, you must be able to add a custom
meta description to the articles or blogs.
Optimize
The Database
The
database is the place where everything about the WordPress site is
saved, however, it differs from the plugins, themes, physical files
or uploads on the server. The database is used by WordPress to store
comments, posts, pages, plugin information, and settings.
Every
time the web page is loaded, it gets the information from the
database and if it is stuffed with unnecessary information, the
website will take a long time to load. Therefore, if you have a large
website, it is important to optimize the database regularly.
Optimize
The Images
Do
you know what type of images can be used on the website and where
will they fit appropriately? Optimizing the images is also important
to increase the performance of your website. Use the images in a
proper format and make sure that they are not heavy. Optimized images
will increase your websites speed and make it load fast.
You
can also add lazyload to the images to give an interesting look to
the website. This process will decrease the loading speed of the
website and save the bandwidth also. To do this automatically, jQuery
Image Lazy Load plugin should be installed.
Replace
PHP with static HTML
Whenever
possible, you can replace PHP with static HTML to cut down your
loading time. By removing unnecessary PHP executions, CPU processing
time and database queries can be saved. So replace the original PHP
code with the processed codes and you are good to go.
Split
Comments Into Different Pages
Every
website has a set of articles or blogs that have gone viral. These
are the articles that were able to generate tons of comments from the
users and thus they consume a lot of server resources.
If
your blog is popular and you are getting great reviews and people
have started a discussion about it, it is advices that you paginate
the comments to save on server resources and to make your website
load faster.
Stay
Updated
The
first and foremost step of WordPress customization is to remain
updated. Staying updated with the latest version of WordPress is
important to maximize the performance of your website. If you do not
stay in sync with the recent updates released by WordPress, you are
potentially putting your business website in security risks.
These
were some of the tricks that will help you to increase the
performance of your WordPress website, convert the visitors into
potential customers and to amplify the business profits. So the next
time you feel that your website has a low loading speed or is not
working perfectly, use these tricks to increase its performance.
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