What makes your WordPress visitors happy is its performance level. If by any chance your website takes more than 4 seconds to load them will click away and never return. This is a nightmare for any webmaster. Your website’s loading speed also plays an important role in your web presence and domain authority. A slow website greatly damages user experience leasing to bouncing rate and lack of trust from visitors. This will eventually result in low ranks in search engines which will adversely affect your business. Fortunately, optimizing your site’s speed is not that difficult. You have already tried by choosing WordPress. What is left is following these simple tips in this article to make your WordPress theme impressive.
You can’t treat a disease without knowing what kind of the ailment you are dealing with. Similarly, it is hard to improve your site’s performance if you don’t know its current metrics. To measure your site’s speed you need to use plugins to analyze your site and give you a breakdown of how it stacks up against the rest of the web. Two such tools are Pingdom and GT Matrix. These two are the most appropriate to analyze your site to give you accurate results. After installing the tools, just open them and input your URL and record your results.
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If you don’t know, images carry the largest files on any website than text. Large files tend to slow downloading speeds. Several tools are used to optimize images making them smaller, without compromising the quality. You need to optimize your images first before loading them to your WordPress site. You can do this in two steps. The first step is to resizing your images to correct dimensions. After properly resizing your images, upload them to an online tool called Tiny PNG, which compresses your images without distorting them. You can then upload the images to your WordPress website after compression. To further optimize your WordPress website, you can use a tool like Smush Image Compression and Optimization tool to compress your existing library as you upload them to your site.
After using your WordPress site for some time, it becomes pretty cluttered and full of unwanted files. Instead of leaving them to pile-up and affect your performance, there are WordPress plugins that you can use to remove them. You can delete them manually, but the process involves accessing your MySQL database which is more technical for most users. The best option is to use tools like WP-DB Manager or WP-Optimize. The process involved in using these tools is pretty simple. Install them from your WordPress backend and choose whether you want to optimize, repair, backup, or restore an older version of your database. Both plugins do the same thing so just pick one that you want. It’s also good to consult your WordPress developer for advice before choosing a theme.
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This is the best option to optimize high traffic sites to improve their performance. If you don’t have caching plugins installed on your website, every time a page or post on your site is loaded information has to be retrieved from your CSS files and databases. The process will take much time since there are multiple levels of communication. Additionally, a static HTML file is generated from that information and served to your visitors, slowing your WordPress site further. Caching plugins store versions of those HTML files in advance, so that they are loaded easily anytime you can access your site. There are two plugins that can be used. This is W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. Once installed, these plugins will reduce loading speeds. High performing hosts have built-in caching.
After a while, all of our sites experience clutter, therefore, you need to regularly unwanted data that is no longer functioning. For example, you may be having a bunch of themes that you haven’t used in years of numerous plugins that are no longer used. Another setback of unused plugins is that they increase security vulnerabilities, this also negatively impact your site’s performance. To do this goes to your WordPress dashboard and deactivate and delete unwanted themes and plugins. Your WordPress site may also have many media files that are not used in your links. To delete these unwanted media install and use a plugin called Media Cleaner, which scans your site for unwanted media.
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Perhaps one of the biggest determinants of your site’s overall performance is your host. Shared hosts are not the best option for running WordPress websites. The reason is that the servers are shared by many users slowing down your site. If you are using one, it’s time to upgrade. A slow hosting will always affect performance on your website even if you emolument all the mentioned tactics. The best option of tackling this is to use WordPress-specific hosts. These dedicated hosts have servers that are completely optimized to run WordPress sites. Don’t forget to check integrated CDN that stores copies of your site on servers across the globe.
I trust that this guide was beneficial to you and you are going to implement them all in your WordPress development to improve your website performance. The visitor’s attention span keeps decreasing daily, so don’t let your site’s performance destroy your site authority.
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