The Speed of a website is as vital as the look. Nothing annoyed your website visitors more than slow loading website. Having a super-fast website is not negotiable in this age and time. Especially with the growing competition among content producers.
Website speed is one of the criteria that Google uses to rank a site. Research has shown that website visitors tend to stay longer on a super-fast website than on a slow site. And this increases your site engagement and overall ranking.
If website speed is this important, how then can you speed up your website speed? That’s exactly what we are going to be learning in this article.
At the end of this article, you would have been equipped with the knowledge on how to effectively optimize your website speed for better performance and ranking.
Let’s dive in….
Choose a Fast and Reliable WordPress Hosting Company.
Having reliable and fast web hosting is crucial to the performance and speed of your website. You must go with a company that will provide you with enough bandwidth that will enable your website to perform optimally with little or no downtime.
If you’re financially okay, you can go for a dedicated server instead of shared hosting. Although this should be determined by the purpose and requirement of your website. If you can not pay for a dedicated server, settle for shared hosting with a reliable company. If you don’t the right company to choose, check our list of recommended hosting companies.
There are different hosting packages that are provided by hosting companies. These include Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, shared hosting, Dedicated hosting, and managed WordPress hosting.
Most newer WordPress users generally go for shared hosting since this is relatively cheaper. Although the speed of your site might be affected by other users who share the same server with you. This is why most established businesses and organizations preferred to choose other robust packages like VPS, dedicated, or managed WordPress hosting.
If you need web hosting I will recommend you choose Namecheap , Hostinger, or Bluehost
click here to get started: https://linktr.ee/Richy_Akinz
Use a Fast and Lightweight Theme
The Theme you use in building your website plays a major role in your website speed optimization. If the theme is bulky it will definitely affect the load time of the site.
It is a good practice to choose a light theme while building your website. There a number of light theme that you can choose from depending on the page builder you are using.
I will recommend Hello Theme for those using Elementor page builder. Other themes you can also use are Neve, Astra, and GeneratePress. All these themes are also fast and light.
Reduce The Numbers of Plugins on Your Website
As much as plugins add functionality to your website, they equally pose threat to your site’s speed and performance. It is advisable to only use quality and fast plugins that are necessary for your website functionality.
Don’t use plugins just because you feel like using them. I will advise you to only install essential plugins and to limit the total number of plugins on your website to a maximum of 15.
And to use plugins from reliable and reputable developers. Also, you can use Elementor or Elementor Pro to reduce the numbers of plugins you will need on your site.
This is because Elementor already has some built-in widgets that can perform certain functionalities that you would have required a plugin. You can use Elementor for contact forms, sliders, galleries, social share icons, and many more.
Optimize Your Site Images
Your website images also contribute to how slow your website loads. Whenever you use large and uncompressed images on your website, it will impact the speed of the website.
There are many ways you can reduce the sizes of images on your site without compromising the qualities. One of such ways is by using plugins. For instance, you can use plugins such as WP Smush, EWWW image optimizer, or Optimole.
Another approach is to use optimized software or image compressors to reduce the sizes of the images before uploading them to your site. You can also store your media files in the cloud and connect them to your website to access using a content delivery network (CDN).
USE Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Serving static files can be difficult because this is not the core business of 99 percent of websites, it’s a good idea to outsource this component of your infrastructure to someone else. Fortunately, there are services specifically intended for this: Content Delivery Networks, or CDN.
It will improve the distribution of static files to your visitors, such as CSS, pictures, fonts, and JavaScript. They are typically quite simple to set up.
CDN employs globally dispersed servers. This indicates that the files will be served by the server nearest to your visitor. As a result, regardless of where the user connects, the load time for photos, for example, will be the same. When providing static files from your own servers, the load time often rises when users are physically present.
You can analyze your website with this free tool: https://richultimatetools.com
Minimize the Time To First Byte
The time it takes for the browser to get the first byte of data from the server is referred to as the time to first byte, or TTFB. This is therefore a server-side issue, but it has a significant impact on the overall speed of your website, so you should take the time to improve it.
When it comes to TTFB, the key issue under your control is the server processing time. As a result, you can try some of Google’s suggestions to increase TTFB:
Optimize the application logic on the server to prepare pages more quickly. If you utilize a server framework, the framework may provide suggestions on how to accomplish this.
Optimize your server’s database queries, or move to quicker database solutions.
Increase the memory or CPU capacity of your server hardware.
A TTFB of less than 200ms is regarded as excellent. The range of 200ms to 500ms is regarded as typical and acceptable. A TTFB regularly more than 600ms must be checked.
Reduce Redirects
Redirects are frequently required when moving and deleting pages, and they are the best approach to minimize broken link issues.
However, having too many of them might result in extra HTTP requests, which can slow down performance, especially on mobile devices.
This implies they should be kept to a minimum. In fact, Google suggests that site owners eliminate them completely.
Unfortunately, most site owners who have ever deleted or rearranged their material will tell you that this is not feasible.
Even so, there is usually potential for improvement.
Use Cloud-Based Website Monitoring
The first step in increasing your website’s performance is to measure it. Measuring performance necessitates the use of certain tools, and regular monitoring is required if you want to be notified if your modifications are increasing or degrading performance over time.
There are two methods for monitoring a website: synthetic monitoring and actual user monitoring.
In any instance, we recommend that you use cloud-based website monitoring solutions so that you may concentrate on expanding your business rather than developing or managing your own tools. Sematext Cloud provides solutions for both synthetic and real-time monitoring.
Reduce server response time
The time it takes for your DNS query to complete is a major impact on how quickly your website loads.
A DNS, or domain name system, is a server that maintains a database of IP addresses and their corresponding host names. When a user enters a URL into their browser, a DNS server converts that URL into the IP address that specifies its online presence.
So, a DNS lookup is the process of locating a certain DNS entry. Consider it like your computer looking for a phone number in a phone book.
For example, suppose you wanted to go to the URL websitebix.com. You’d input this into your browser, but it wouldn’t signify much to your computer.
Your ISP will use DNS to determine the IP address associated with that URL.
It will be assigned an IP address that will direct it to the site you are looking for. This step eliminates the need for users to memorize large sequences of numbers in order to access information online.
The length of time required for this phase is determined by the speed of your DNS provider. If not, it may be time to change DNS providers.
Cache
Website design code must be simple for developers. Website code that is easy to write, read, and maintain results in more efficient website development procedures. This involves routinely utilizing accessible code methods to cut down on lengthy coding for specific website features.
Adding too many redundant loops and needless code lines, increases page rendering times by a few milliseconds. When a flood of website traffic hits, the milliseconds add up to bring page performance down below acceptable levels.
Webmasters can improve response times by offering cached versions of the requested material.
When certain circumstances are satisfied, the web cache mechanism temporarily stores copies of web content. These stored copies are then used to meet later user requests from the cache database. This procedure decreases the number of client-server round trips required to transmit (static) website content to browsers.
If you have a WordPress site, you can quickly activate caching by using a plugin like W3 Total Cache.
Conclusion
Increasing your page load speeds is a difficult task, but it will have a major beneficial influence on your entire site performance.
It’s also essential to realize that, while all of the suggestions on this page might help you accomplish your site performance objectives, you don’t have to put them all into action right now.
Also, keep in mind that this is a process with no distinct beginning and goal. You may not have to make all of the proposed modifications right now. Spend some time investigating the monitoring tool data, then make adjustments to the website and evaluate performance before and after the modifications.
Improving website speed can be difficult, especially given the wide range of devices, connections, browsers, and operating systems, but it will have a big beneficial influence on your business if your website is one of your primary channels for reaching clients.
Check our other articles on interesting tips to help with your website performance.
Here: https://websitebix.com/bog