It’s important to have a WordPress website that loads pages quickly. It improves the overall user experience, and it’s good for search engine optimization (SEO). A few changes and consistent updating can ensure that your website works as fast as possible. This short guide provides a few useful ways to speed up WordPress performance.
Optimize Your Website’s Background Processes
Your WordPress website runs several processes in the background to keep things moving smoothly. Therefore, you must optimize these processes because some of these processes, such as excessive crawling and backup plugins, can make your website slower. In that cases, you should ensure that your backup plugin only operates when your website has low traffic. For crawling, keep checking the Google crawling reports to view if there are excessive errors.
Install a Caching Plugin on WordPress
Installing a caching plugin on your WordPress website can make it faster by 2x to 5x. A caching plugin will not generate the whole page each time. Instead, it makes a copy of the page after loading it for the first time. That copy is then a cached version that every user will see. Therefore, it won’t slow down your website significantly if there’s a lot of traffic.
Update WordPress Frequently
One of the easiest ways to ways to speed up WordPress performance is to update the website frequently. Updating fixes security issues and removes bugs that could be slowing things down. Therefore, you should be diligent about updating your website, the plugins, and the themes. In addition to slowing down your website, not updating your WordPress website also makes it more susceptible to security threats.
Optimize the Images for Better Speed
You should never upload images on your website without first running them through photo editing software. Images in their original image can be large, which can significantly slow down websites. Compressing the images makes them smaller in size. You should use two file formats: JPEG and PNG. JPEG is best for colorful images, and PNG is great for transparent or simpler images.
Break Comments into Pages
As fantastic as comments are for your website, they can slow the website down. So, you can break your comments into pages using the feature built in WordPress. You can find this setting in the “discussion” section in the “settings.” You just have to check the box that’s beside the option “break comments into pages.”
Embed Videos and Audio Instead of Uploading Directly
You should avoid uploading video and audio directly to your website. Instead, embed the videos from another website, such as YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, etc. You can embed videos by copying and pasting the video URL in the built-in video embedding feature.
Above are only a few simple and quick ways to speed up WordPress performance. Making these few changes can yield results almost instantly. If you need more help with SEO and website optimization, reach out to Marketing Tiki today!