In this mobile age, users prefer things that can be accessed seamlessly on the go, without putting in much effort. Indubitably, WordPress is a powerful open source CMS that empowers an impressive and functional website, but if your impressive site is consuming a considerable amount of time, this may annoy your potential readers. It has been observed that over 50% of the viewers abandon a website if it consumes over 3 seconds to load a page. This will ultimately impact the success ratio of the site. While creating bottlenecks in its overall performance, it will also affect the search engine ranking. Thus, it is more than imperative to optimize the site loading time to ensure a surefire website.
For the folks, who are striving to optimize their WordPress site, this article will help you decrease the site loading time by implementing a few simple and effective tips.
Let's distill a few proficient tips to accentuate your web page loading time.
1. Get Rid Of Sluggish Servers
The web hosting services greatly impact your websites' speed. There are several alluring host service providers that offer services either for free or at affordable prices. It is advisable to don't streamline your choice for a host service provider by considering the service cost, rather look for the quality offered.
A good host service provider can dramatically increase your site loading time. However, it is not necessary that it is your host service provider who is always responsible. In fact, you may have a good host service, but might have enrolled into a wrong hosting plan. Thus, it is essential to analyze the impact of the services that you are using and accordingly choose a proficient host service provider with a worthy plan.
2. Identify The Plugins Creating Hindrance In Site Performance
Plugins form a major reason that adds to the site loading time. It has been found that with more and more number of plugins on a site, the site loading time increases. There could be several reasons for this like poor coding, persistent calls to an external server, and more.
There are several resourceful plugins available in the WordPress repository that offer incredible functionalities. You may use a plugin (like P3 plugin) to monitor the performance of other plugins, which are active on your site. This way, you can analyze the inefficient plugins and look for a proficient plugin that can comparatively deliver better results.
3. Integrate Only Web Optimized Images
According to the latest web trends, it is imperative to add precise and concise web content to make your site appear more interactive and engaging. No doubt, the visual content enhances the overall look and feel of the content and make it easily readable. So, adding relevant images, video or other media files in a website are considered as a great practice.
However, inserting heavy files will certainly add to the site loading time. Therefore, it is advisable to use the compressed images and other files to beautify your content without compromising with the quality and site's performance. You can use plugins for the same, and plugins like WP Smush it and Lazy Loud are a great choice.
4. Content Delivery Network Offers A Great Solution
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) will host your files across a wide network of servers across the globe. This way, the data is downloaded from a server that is geographically near to a user. This process ultimately minifies the load over a single server by spreading the relevant data over multiple servers. Although, configuring a CDN can consume a good amount of time, but it would be worth a great value for boosting the page-loading speed.
5. Reduce The CSS and JavaScript Files
Whilst WordPress plugins offer greater capabilities, but this can't be denied that each plugin adds a great number of CSS and JavaScript files to each web page. This creates performance bottlenecks. To break through this issue, you can place all the JavaScript into one JavaScript file and all the CSS into one CSS file.
Again, these files can be combined as a file by simply using an efficient plugin. By doing so, the number of requests that the browser is required to make will ultimately reduce.
6. Set The Gravatar Image As A Blank Space
Instead of using the default Gravatar image, it is better to set no value for the Discussion field under the Settings tabs in your WP dashboard. Some users think that Gravatar image makes a site appear more aesthetic, but indeed, it adds to the loading time. Thus, by keeping it empty, you can substantially improve your page loading time.
7. Use Cache plugin
Since, static file doesn't include MySQL and PHP code, implementing static HTML files instead of dynamic files will certainly improve the site loading time. You can publish static HTML files by installing a cache plugin.
Moreover, caching also facilitates resourceful features like caching of feeds, CDN support, Gzipping and a lot more. There are numerous caching plugins, including, W3 Total Cache, W3 Super Cache and more that are available for free and delivers outstanding performance.
8. Keep Your WP Trash System Empty
Whenever some content like post, comment, media, and so forth, is deleted from the WordPress, it is not deleted completely from the database. It is rather sent to the trash. Thus, it allows owners to either delete the content permanently or restore it again from the trash. So that if ever any content is deleted mistakenly that can be easily restored.
If your WP trash is filled up with a lot a data, it will add load to the database, which will directly influence the site loading time. However, by default, the WP auto deletes the trash after every 30 days. But, this number of days can be reduced to a desired number by simply making a small tweak in the wp-config.php file.
For this, you may add the following line of code in your wp-config.php file.
// this will reduce it from 30 days to 4 daysdefine ('EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 4);
// this will completely disable the trash systemdefine ('EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 0);
Wrapping Up:
These efficient tips will improve the WP site loading time. Earnestly adhere to these tips and make your WordPress site deliver an incredible performance with a blazingly great loading time. This will ultimately leverage your remarkable online presence and help you boost your business values.
About the Author:
Amanda Cline is serving as a professional PHP Programmer at Xicom Technologies Ltd- A renowned custom development company. If you need to hire PHP developer then simply get in touch with Amanda via Twitter. she has also written interesting and informative articles on Custom Software Development, Web Application Development etc.