WordPress has become the primary platform for creating websites worldwide. The main reason behind this is that it is dynamic and user-friendly. As well, it powers more than 835 million websites on the internet. But how can you speed up your WordPress website with the right web hosting for small businesses?
In this blog, we’ll be sharing several foolproof techniques that you can follow to optimize your WordPress website’s performance. Using these techniques, you can increase your page load speed and SEO ranking. Consequently, you can provide an excellent user experience for your audience.
But why is WordPress performance optimization so important? And what are the different techniques to optimize speed with the perfect WordPress hosting UK solution?
Importance of WordPress Performance Optimization
A slow-loading WordPress website directly corresponds to a loss of sales and traffic. Statistics can change, but according to a study, around 57% of visitors will leave your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Therefore, if you aim to increase page views, generate more leads, increase conversions, or accomplish any other goal, it is necessary to speed up your website for an improved user experience and website speed.
Another downside of a slow-loading WordPress website is that it can affect your SEO rankings. As you know, different search engines, like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, consider a couple of factors when ranking your website, including speed, performance, and the interaction of users. An easy-to-use and fast-loading website reveals to search engines that you worry about your website visitors and provides an unmatched user experience for them. Subsequently, your web content is going to be ranked higher in search engine results pages.
Also, keep in mind that optimizing WordPress isn’t a one time task. The longer your website is on the web, the more new content you’ll add, and the more significant it is to regularly maintain and optimize it.
8 Tried and Tested Techniques to Optimize Your WordPress Performance
1. Select the Right Web Hosting Service
A web hosting provider saves your website files and delivers them to your visitors when they request them. If you don’t opt for the right web host, website optimization won’t be advantageous.
Therefore, it is crucial to select a reliable WordPress hosting UK service that provides faster page speeds and a higher uptime guarantee. At the same time, excellent technical support. Furthermore, you’ll have to look forward to one web host that offers WordPress-related features such as automatic updates and backups. Because of this, the majority of website owners decide to host their websites through MilesWeb’s web hosting for small businesses.
Websites on MilesWeb.com are hosted on highly secure, ultra-fast web servers developed particularly for WordPress websites. Irrespective of their expertise, their team is completely focused on offering everything you require to succeed. If you face any challenge, their professional support team is there to help you.
They integrate premium CDN, which supports a worldwide network of data centers, to deliver your content to every visitor on the basis of their geographical location. It also helps your website load faster without any downtime.
2. Select the Best Quality WordPress Theme
WordPress users can access a wide range of themes with distinct styles and features. From thousands of WordPress theme options, you can select the ones that have suitable layouts and functionalities for your type of website or particular business.
However, it’s quite captivating to select a design based on how it appears, there’s much more than that. Selecting a design that looks alluring but has bad performance will affect your website over the long term. You should always personalize WordPress themes in order to best fit your design preferences. Hence, when selecting a WordPress theme for your website, you should take the following factors into account:
- Features: Indeed, your desired features should be included in it. But also, be careful not to choose heavy themes because they can slow down your website.
- Check Demo: Check out the selected theme’s demo and analyze how fast it can load page elements. Also, check whether it lags or not.
- Check Reviews: By reading several positive reviews, you can ensure that the themes are recent and look out for anything that leads to slow load times.
- Its Support: Good WordPress themes will have helpful alternatives, given that if you get into trouble, particularly with optimizing speed. Several free WordPress themes will depend on forums; therefore, look into them to find out whether there are any latest contributions and whether the developer is active and receptive.
- Latest Updates: Like every other technology, WordPress is continuously evolving. Your selected theme needs to keep abreast of the current version of WordPress, thereby it functions properly and loads quickly. If a considerable amount of time has passed since the last update, then it might not be any more supported by the developer.
3. Optimize Images
Images are the most important component of any website. However, their large file size can contribute to slow loading times. If your website is slow-loading, and if you haven’t optimized your images for a long time, this could negatively affect your website.
Remember that large-sized images also require more time to load; it is up to you to do some compression on the image files to be posted on your website. The images can be optimized on the WordPress website by uploading them in the correct size that is needed on the website and by using other image editors that are needed, such as any compression tool like ImageOptim or Photoshop.
Another option is to utilize a WordPress plugin like Smush, which optimizes images when uploaded to the website. You can use this plugin to compress images that are in your Media Library.
Using the Jetpack plugin, you can automatically compress images and also resize the files for smartphones, increasing speed where it’s most required. The best part is that Jetpack’s speed feature is already built in; therefore, it doesn’t require any action from your side!
4. Make Use of Caching
When a visitor visits your website, their web browser passes through a process of loading all files, photos, and sections of code on the web page. Caching helps speed up this process by storing a copy of your website in a visitor’s browser; thus, it helps skip a large part of this loading process when they visit next time.
A variety of caching plugins are available, which you can set up manually from your website. For example, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, and much more. These plugins need different levels of skills and experience.
Some of them have lesser customization alternatives but are easy to configure. Other plugins let you edit each detail but are complicated to use. Be cautious here, because any inaccurate caching configuration can crash your website.
5. Deactivate Any Unwanted Plugins
Every active plugin on your website loads code when any visitor visits your website. The more the number of plugins there are, the more codes need to be loaded and therefore, more amounts of data are needed to be processed, causing the slow speed of your website.
Thus, it is important to disable unwanted or extra plugins because it takes lesser time for the server to process the data in relation to the visitors and frequency of access. Check out the plugins running on your website and determine if there is any plugin that is not useful to you.
If, at all, you are in doubt as to whether a specific plugin is necessary for your website, you should deactivate it and observe whether or not it makes any changes to your website. If you do not observe any change, you can remove it from your website. It is advisable to take a backup of your website before making any changes to it.
To deactivate a WordPress plugin, one will log into the website, then navigate to the “plugins” section >>> navigate to Installed Plugins >>> search for the one that you want to be deactivated, and then click on deactivate.
Do not worry, in case you change your decision! Just reactivate that particular plugin. If you aren’t thinking of reusing it, you can permanently delete it from your website.
6. Always Use a Commercial DNS Service
The performance of your WordPress website can be improved by utilizing a commercial DNS service. A DNS, i.e., a domain name system, is a phone directory of the web that translates human-readable website names [for example, https://www.abc.com] into IP (Internet Protocol) addresses [for example, 192.168.0.38] that the computer understands.
You get a domain name from a DNS service provider and the service you choose affects the speed of your website because it is responsible for informing browsers where your website is located on the web. If it takes longer to locate your website, then your website too will take a longer time to load.
Therefore, ensure that you select a well-known DNS service provider that speeds up the domain lookup process and makes it reliable every time.
7. Make Use of a CDN
As mentioned above, a CDN, or content delivery network, is a group of servers that are distributed all across the globe and are responsible for handing over your website’s content to visitors.
Every time any user wishes to access your website, your web pages are sourced from the closest server to the user. Hence, a CDN may prove helpful in enhancing the performance of your website since the distance of your server from your visitor’s browser is reduced.
8. Reduce the Third-Party Scripts
You should limit the use of third-party scripts because they can slow down your website, just like plugins. They add additional data that must be processed when any user visits your website. Additionally, they can insert vulnerabilities and keep track of your visitors behind their backs or without consent. Have a look at some of the tools that could insert third-party scripts into your website – Google Analytics, chat boxes, ads, videos inserted by YouTube or Vimeo, or through social media feeds.
Since many of them are completely appropriate, secure, and useful, you’ve got to restrict them if feasible. At least you must try to reduce the effect that they have on the performance of your website. You can achieve this by doing custom code modifications and using a few CDN tools. The simplest way is to utilize a WordPress plugin such as Autoptimize, which consists of a script blocker.
How To Measure the Performance of Your WordPress Website?
If your aim is to check the effectiveness of your website, there are numerous tools where all you need to do is provide your website’s address or URL, and the tool will create a report. Google PageSpeed Insights is the most used one.
After providing your URL, you can check the performance score of your website both on a desktop as well as on a smartphone. You will also receive strategic suggestions for improving the website. Other instruments that you can employ include GTmetrix, WebPageTest, and Pingdom.
These tools can also be used to diagnose your Core Web Vitals and determine what areas you need to enhance.
Conclusion
WordPress websites are recognized for being quick and flexible, but they succeed with some efforts that enhance your website’s speed and customer experience. As discussed earlier, there are plenty of techniques to enhance the performance of your website.
All it needs is some awareness and the desire to work with some excellent tools and your website will be more efficient than you can possibly imagine. Therefore, stop waiting, you could be losing out on substantial traffic as well as revenue.
Benefit from MilesWeb’s WordPress hosting UK and save time and cost, as well as optimize the performance of your WordPress website by integrating lots of performance-improving features such as faster page loads, expert and dedicated WordPress support, advanced security, Tier 4 certified data centers, free domains, SSL certificates, and email that can manage heavy workloads.
Andrej Fedek is the creator and the one-person owner of two blogs: InterCool Studio and CareersMomentum. As an experienced marketer, he is driven by turning leads into customers with White Hat SEO techniques. Besides being a boss, he is a real team player with a great sense of equality.