Website’s speed is one of the crucial parameters when it comes to providing superior customer experience and improving the conversion rate. In this blog, we will walk you through the steps for improving your WordPress website’s speed time.
We recently launched an infographic about page load time which stated that most visitors decide to stay with the site or leave it within 3 seconds. Darn! Wish that wasn’t true, but unfortunately it is!
Before taking a dive into the plugins that are slowering your site down, consider the server mechanism. Check out whether the site is slow because of sluggish server or a bloated theme. To prevent the basic fails, host your website over good server. Over and above that, choose only themes which are really good. Test the theme’s demo using tools like Pingdom (We use that for our clients’ websites too.) Also, consider have provisions for Content Delivery Network as stated in our infographic.
If you are already through on the intial foundation and still encountering troubles with the site speed, here are the quick fixes:
1. Plugins that are not so heavenly – Chuck them or Minimize their usage!
Well, first thing first identify the plugins that are slowering your website speed. P3 is one of the good diagnostic plugins as it shows the list of plugins that are slowerng the site speed. We have identified that nornally social sharing plugins take a whopping time to let the site load. Check out the baddys and minimize their usage finding good work arounds.
2. Compress your website and work on some caching!
Well, yes if you think compressing site or images can decrease the load time, you are right! Use tools like Gzip as mentioned in our infographic. Once installed, Gzip automatically compresses your website’s files as ZIP files, and when a user visits your website, their browser will automatically unzip the files. You should ideally also compress images on the site using plugins and then run them with the same plugins. WP Smush.it helps you achieve this amazingly well. In case if you have more repeat visitors, browser catching might help too.
3. Turn off Pingbacks and Trackbacks
WordPress alerts other blogs that you post links to by methods like Pingbacks and Trackbacks. They are quite interesting, but might also hamper the page speed. You can turn them off under the “Discussion” tab in “Settings.”
4. Specify Image Dimensions and Character Sets
Your visitor’s browser will display your web page after figuring out the layout, content and images. If your WP site has image dimentions specified, browsers will have to do less work and speed things up. For the very same reason, specifying character set in your HHTP headers is useful. Simply add the character set to your website’s head section.
5. CSS at the top and JS at the bottom
Putting up the CSS style sheets as close to the top of the page is highly recommended. This helps browsers to render page in speedier ways. Keep all the JS at the bottom of the footer so that the load time decreases. Moreover, while doing so also focus on minifying the CSS files and JS. You could easily do it using Plugins such as Better WordPress Minify which will combine all of your style sheets and JavaScript files into one, in turn reducing the number of requests that the browser needs to make.
6. Clean up the Database
Most WP sites have the feature to autosave stuff, but this is also a negative point when it comes to site speed. The database gets filled with thousands of post revisions, pingbacks, trashed posts, new categories and menu content and just so much more. With the fantastic WP-Optimize plugin you will be easily able to clean up the DB and efficiently enhance the site speed.
Apart, there are some awesome WP Plugins you must utilize for various purpose. Remember, visitors like the sites to be superfast and if you have a WP site like most other companies, make sure you provide amazing customer experiene using best available plugins and the above tips.
Webby Monks
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