Your WordPress website needs to load fast. Faster websites keep visitors engaged. The difference between waiting 2 seconds and 5 seconds for a website to load is substantial. Google’s rankings are based partly on your site speed and users are known to quickly leave a site if it loads in 5 seconds or more. WordPress speed optimization can dramatically increase your conversion rates while boosting your rankings in search, as Google uses website speed .
The most common (major) issues are:
- Images need to be optimized
- Too many redirects
- Too many WordPress plugins
- Not utilizing broswer cache
- Server and coding issues
How to make website load fast and optimise the speed of your WordPress site?
There are few things you can do to improve site speed and user experience.
1: Make sure you are using a Cache plugin. Here is list of some good ones.W3 Total Cache
One of the best and most downlaoded cache plugin. Downloads: 4,808,605.
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
Downloads: 449,066
downloads 2,446,750 times.
W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
2: Database Optimization
Optimize and clean your database regularly. You can do this from your host panel or you can use wordpress plugins. There are two good plugins
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
3: Post, Page, Comments Clean-Up:
Remove unnecessary post and page revisions and spam comments (site’s often have hundreds or thousands of these stored in the database)
4: Image Optimization:
Optimize images (reduce size, losslesly compress, properly resize images so they are scaled correctly)
5: Plugin Cleanup:
Check all your plugins for resource usage, remove unecessary plugins and/or install better replacements when possible
6: Fix 404 Errors:
Remove broken calls to the server causing 404 errors and decreasing page load time