ReviewHostingASP.NET – One of the most important aspects of a website, be it personal or company site, is the speed. While your website visitor (potential customers) are browsing your website, you want to provide them with the best experience, so speed is crucial. Website users are impatient, they want the access information quickly, without any waiting time. If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, visitor will leave without the change of seeing your content. Speed is also important for engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. Search bots will access and index your website, and will use different computing methods to calculate that accessibility and speed of the pages. The speed of your website can significantly affect the rankings. That said, let’s see how you can improve the speed of WordPress website by following some easy steps.
How To Improve The Speed of WordPress Website?
Choose A Reliable WordPress Hosting Provider
The base of every website is web hosting. You can have the best website and the most useful content on the web, if your hosting provider sucks your website will suck as well. Depending on your website type and your budget, you need to find a suitable and good web hosting company that provides great features, quality support and great speed. For hosting your WordPress site,we recommend using HostForLIFE or ASPHostPortal hosting. Avoid at all cost using free web hosting, because these services will only harm your website by placing unwanted links and forced ads on your site and are extremely unreliable. The ideal would be to buy a dedicated server, because this can provide the best performance, however renting this type of hosting plan is very expensive. A small WordPress blog will run smoothly on a shared hosting plan, while a website that receives a good amount of traffic will need to be placed on a dedicated server.
Choose A Lightweight WordPress Theme
The theme can influence the loading speed a lot. The more files the theme is using, the slower your website will load. The best performance are provided by minimal themes, however most people dislike these. You will find the best themes on the official website: https://wordpress.org/themes/, where you can search by different colors, designs and features, all being checked by WordPress staff. Another well maintained source is Theme Forest, where you can find premium themes with high quality design, well written code and support as well. You should choose a theme that has good reviews and is updated frequently.
Optimize Website Content
The content can also impact the speed of your blog. You should only upload web-optimized images to your blog. Using an image editor software such as Photoshop, you can resize the images and save them for web use. Depending on the content you have on your website, it is recommended to not use too many images on the same page. If you can’t split the content in multiple parts, use a plugin such as Lazy Load that will only load the image when user is actually viewing it. This can save you lot of bandwidth as well help you to have a better loading time. If possible use external sources such as Youtube to host your content.
As the homepage is usually the most busiest page on your website, make sure that is well optimized. Displaying few of the latest posts with the excerpt of each, eventually a thumbnail can also help in improving the speed. If you need to host high resolution images, you should create thumbnails and link those to the the photos you want to show. The images will only load when a user clicks the thumbnail, this way your website will display that content only on request.
Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Using a content delivery network (CDN) helps you to save your websites content in the cloud and also to keep your website online in case your hosting fails. We recommend CloudFlare which can be installed very easily from cPanel and it’s free. On average, a website on CloudFlare loads two times faster, uses 60% less bandwidth, has 65% fewer requests and is way more secure.
Block Unwanted Users And Bots
There are many useless bots that will access and crawl your website. There can also be hackers who will try to break into your system by constantly accessing your website trying to find a weak spot. These can also affect the loading time of your blog. With inserting few lines into the .htaccess file, you can ban these bots and range of IP addresses from accessing your website. You only want to allow real visitors on your website and ban as many fake clicks as possible.
Limit The Number Of Installed Plugins
Both the number of plugins and their complexity can affect the speed of your WordPress blog. You should install only the plugins you really need. If necessary, test multiple plugins and run a speed test with GT metrix or other online tool that can provide with an accurate test result on your website speed.
Also, be sure you download and install plugins from secure and trusted websites such as https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or Theme Forest. There are some plugins that can help you a little by optimizing the images (WP-SmushIt), either by saving content using cache (W3 Total Cache).
Caching Your Website And Reduce File Size
With the use of a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache can also help in making your website load faster and improve website performance. The plugin will optimize CSS and JS files and will minify your blog’s pages saving bandwidth and providing a better user experience.