WordPress is powerful and popular and content management system offers a great set of features to make your experience as a publisher on the internet easy and pleasant. This is global platform and millions of users. According to the recent statistics in May -2016, we got the following figures.
- WordPress is used by 59.5% of all websites. This is 26.4 of all websites.
- Drupal is used by 4.9% of all websites. This is 2.2% of all websites.
- Joomla is used by 6.0% of all websites. This is 2.7% of all websites.
- Magento is used by 2.0% of all websites. This is 1.3% of all websites.
Definitely, WordPress has a bunch of features like simplicity, flexibility, publish with ease and many other exceptional features, which makes it more popular than the other CMS. But, despite of a bunch of features, some drawbacks are associated with this platform, and that is security and slow loading time are two major problems with this platform.
In this blog, we will focus on loading time of WordPress, rather than say we will highlight proactive steps toward speeding up WordPress. Literally, different people have different opinions, some say WordPress is perfect, on the other side some complain on certain issue like speed, security, scalability and difficult to manage the site.
What should be the loading speed of the website? Here we will not go for any guesswork, like it should be 2, 3 , 4 or 5 seconds; rather we will adopt some practical approach and show some facts. If the loading time of the website is more than 7 seconds, then it will consider very poor. If the web page uploads between 3-7 seconds, then it will consider average. Between 1-3 second will consider above average and below one second is perfect.
Why Site Speed is Important-
- Ø According to the recent research, it is found that two second longer delay in page reduces user satisfaction and most of the people leave the site. Even slow speed also have direct negative impact on indexation, when the inaccessible site is not crawled by search engine for days or a week, then ranking of the site start suffering.
- Ø Google recently include site speed in its ranking algorithm, that means site speed is the important factor for quality SEO services. So if your site is slow, then your site will lose visibility and ranking in search engine.
Proactive Steps Toward Speeding Up WordPress Website
Definitely, everyone hates slow website, visitors will leave the site immediately if site is too slow either it is WordPress website or something else, no matter. In this scenario, some solid and simple steps need to adopt to speeding up the WordPress website. So, in this blog we will highlight some tried and tested steps to speed up the website and we guarantee that using a few will speed up your site.These are the following 10 steps which we discuss one by one.
- Go for a good hosting company
- Install a caching plugin
- Clean up the database
- Select a good theme for the website
- Fix all the broken links
- Optimize photos and images
- Use a content delivery network
- Optimize the Home page
- Clean up Spam Comments and Post Revisions
- Monitor the web performance
Go for the good hosting company- We think this is the most important point, and you must consider when investing in hosting. Always go for a good hosting company, they will turn the speed of website from average to lightening speed. These are three hosting companies that I do recommend choosing between.
- WPEngine- WPEngine is one of the ideal hosting options for the WordPress website. Their hosting plans start from 29 USD per month.They will offer you top notch hosting services so you get a lightening speed site without any extra hassle like CDN and .htaccess file.
- BlueHost- BlueHost is the reliable hosting company, its price starts at only Rs. 239/ month. It offers following services like host an unlimited number of domains, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited hosting space, unlimited email account and 30 days money back guarantee.
- Hosting24- Hosting24 is very good all around. Their hosting plans are very reasonable, 3.99 USD per month for shared hosting and 10.78 USD per month for VPS hosting.
Install a caching plugin- WP total cache plugin or WP super cache plugin could be an ideal option for the website. This plugin will improve the user experience and performance of the site, such as database, pages, browser, and more others. Both are free to download and very good.
Clean up the database- Especially it happens with WordPress, often due to saved draft, post versions and deactivate plugin the database get very messy, In this scenario, WP optimize is a simple but effective plugin that will delete all unnecessary stuffs without doing manual queries.
Select the good theme for the website- Select the good theme for the website, especially if you have a WordPress website. To attract the more and more visitors to the site, web designers leave no stone unturned to design a beautiful website, but performs terribly an SEO perspective and speed perspective. Since, nowadays millions WordPress theme comes with so many bells and whistle that it is no wonder that take more than ten seconds to load. In this scenario, customized and simple theme proven to work the best.
Fix all the broken links- Defenitely, visitors will leave the site immediately if they meet to several 404 errors. Here we want to define the broken link, “ A broken link is also known as dead link on a web page that no longer works due to wrong URL entered for the link by the website owner is also known as a 404 error.” To speeding up the website, fix all the broken links. To identify all the broken links. I do recommend using the following free tools:
- Google webmaster tool
- Screaming Frog SEO spider
- Ahrefs
Optimize photo and images- Large photo and images take long time to load, so it is mandatory to keep the images and photos to the correct size. Fortunately, WP-SmushIt is amazing plugin that will reduce the file size of image without reducing the quality. For the format of your photos and images, .jpg and .png is your best option. You can also use the .gif format for small graphics. You should avoid using .bmp and .tiff formats on your web pages.
Optimize the Home Page- Home Page is most important part of the website because the maximum visitors land here. So optimize the home page to ensure that it loads quickly. Things that you can do include:
- Don’t post the full article just show excerpts.
- Reduce the number of posts on the page.
- Remove unnecessary sharing widget.
- Remove inactive plugins and widget that you don’t need.
Clean up spam comment and post revision- Spam comment and post revision not only depreciate the online value of the website, but also slow down the database response time of the WordPress website. Better delete revision plugin will remove and delete old revision of post and spam comments. This tool will optimize the database and speed up the website.
Use content delivery network- Content delivery network is series of server and point of presence which improves the scalability of content, improve the page load time and reduce the download time of the content by bringing it closer to the users. This is the most effective way to improve speed of the website.
Monitor the web performance– If you really want to improve performance of the website, then monitor the performance of the website. This will give you exact idea that which kind of rectification need to do. This is not so difficult, numerous free tools are available on internet which will help you to focus on different details of your website,s performance.
Five Excellent Tools To Test The Performance of The Website
Pingdom Tools- Pingdom is a very easy tool for expert and novice that will analyze speed of the website and help you to make it faster. It will examine all parts of web pages like view file size, loading time and details about every single element of a web page.
Web Page Analyzer- Web page analyzer is a free website performance and analysis tool. This tool will give you the information like page size, composition, download time and also suggest you to improve the page speed based on the result.
WbsitePulse- WebsitePulse is a cost effective and easy to use online tool, that enable clients to increase the efficiency and productivity of e- business. Simultaneously, it is very safe and reduces the risk of failed internet transactions and lost revenue.
GTMetrix- GTMetrix is very effective and informative tool that will analyze the speed of the site and make it faster. With this tool, it is very easy to track and monitor the performance of the website such as video playback and performance reports.
Google PageSpeed Insights- Probably Google PageSpeed Insight is most popular tool to check the performance of website, you can say that this is must have tool that every website owner must have. This tool will provide you wide range of information and tips to boost the performance of the website. In short, Google PageSpeed Insight will guide you, “what to do to improve the performance of the website.” You can run and see the result for both desktop and mobile.
Wrapping Up- We have no doubt to say that now page speed is more important than ever before. The way people are browsing the internet it is expected that mobile internet user will surpass the desktop user in upcoming years. Since, internet user does not like to wait so much and they will leave the site immediately, if the site is too slow. So, we listed some effective and simple way to improve the speed of the WordPress website and we are very sure using a few will speed up your site.