4 Ways To Speed Up WordPress Website

Today I thought that it would be a good day to talk about how important site speed is to the success of your WordPress website or blog. The maintenance end of blogging can be overwhelming, especially for a beginner. But I will tell you about 4 ways you can speed up a WordPress website.

Maintaining the functionality of your site can be boring but necessary. Probably you can avoid dealing with it for a while but eventually having a slow website is going to mess with you.

Having a slow site is not only annoying for your readers, but it’s also terrible for your SEO (Google doesn’t like it).

Google considers your site speed in its rankings. Google can see how fast your site is. And if it’s slow, you aren’t going to make the first page of a Google search.

So what is slowing your website down and how to fix those issues?

Fix Images On WordPress Website

No matter what type of website or blog you have, you do use Images. Images are a great way to break up paragraphs and keep your blog posts and entire website looking interesting. When uploading images, stick to PNG and/or JPG format. Avoid TIFF and BMP, which take much longer to load. Also, try to create/upload your images in the size you will be displaying them on your blog.

For example you have an image of 1000x1500px and upload it but then only display it as let’s say 230x345px your readers will still have to load the full image size.

It will take longer and there’s a good chance your readers won’t stick around for those images to load. So keep in mind to check your image size and don’t use bigger images than you need.

Fix Plugins On WordPress Website

Plugins can also mess with your site speed. If you have a lot of plugins it means that a lot is happening in the back-end and it is slowing your site.

The more plugins you add, the slower things will get. And you will be taking up more storage space and bandwidth. You must delete all unused plugins! And of course, update any that have updates available. Check for updates often, they are there for a reason. Making sure you have the latest version of your plugin will ensure they run smoothly.

Fix Caching On WordPress Website

While having too many plugins can be problematic, having the right ones can make your site faster. Installing a caching plugin can greatly improve your search engine result page ranking and overall page performance.

So what is caching you may ask? Caching is the process of temporarily storing frequently accessed data in a cache. When you visit a web page you have already viewed, the browser can get those files from the cache instead of having to go back to the original server.

This saves you time and helps the network function faster and more efficiently. Having a caching plugin means the browser doesn’t have to retrieve new information each time a site is viewed.

Tidy Up WordPress Website

The last thing, get on board with minimalism. The more stuff your site has going on, the more your speed suffers. So sometimes less really is more.

Start by evaluating your sidebar. It’s like free advertising space, so it’s very tempting to fill it up and use every widget you can. Ask yourself if you can get rid of anything on your sidebar.

Keep the obvious stuff. You want social links, a place for readers to subscribe, etc. But say you’ve got an ad for something you’ve never seen any return from, get rid of it.

Conclusion

Now that you know about all those things, you may wonder how you know the speed of your website.

You can check your site’s speed here – Google’s PageSpeed

Simply enter the URL for your site, click Analyze, and wait for your speed score. Your score will fall into the Fast, Average, or Slow category. You can check your score for both mobile and desktop views. Change from one to the other on the left-hand side, above your score. Keep scrolling and you’ll be given suggestions on how to improve your score/speed.

Now that you have your score, implement those things we’ve talked about in this post, and check your score again. You may want to try one thing at a time to see if your score went up or down with each change.

Take your site speed seriously. If your site is slow you most likely will lose potential readers to some other faster website that got ranked higher on Google although your overall content is a good quality.