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Best WordPress Hosting plan that can meet your website requirements. Not having good service will be the cause of a slow website.
Speed up your WordPress Website
That your website is fast is very important for a project or business. Having a slow website not only leaves a bad impression on visitors, but it also makes them more likely to abandon their visit. Pages that load in one to five seconds increase the likelihood of a bounce by 90% .
Additionally, search engines like Google consider page speed to be a ranking factor . Slow websites will have a harder time getting discovered organically.
Here we leave you a guide of practical tips to fix and optimize slow sites in WordPress. Fortunately, there are ways to fix a slow site.
Choosing the Best WordPress Hosting for Your WordPress Website
First, make sure you use a reliable best WordPress hosting provider and a plan that can meet your website requirements. Not having good service will be the cause of a slow website.
You should ensure that the hosting company you choose has a proven track record of delivering excellent WordPress performance and customer support. Some best WordPress hosting providers offer unique features to speed up WordPress.
Once you’ve chosen a best WordPress hosting provider, it’s time to select the most suitable plan for your WordPress site. In general, best WordPress hosting providers offer a variety of hosting types , for example:
- Shared Hosting: A type of entry-level hosting that hosts different websites on the same server, sharing their resources.
- Cloud Hosting: A type of premium hosting that offers dedicated resources from a network of multiple servers. It is as simple to use as shared hosting.
- Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting: A type of hosting that provides users with root access and dedicated resources. Requires some technical experience to set up and maintain.
- Best WordPress Hosting: A type of shared hosting designed specifically for WordPress in regards to website performance and security.
To get the best WordPress performance and loading times from your chosen best WordPress hosting plan, don’t forget to consider your goals, the amount of content you want to load, and the anticipated amount of traffic in advance.
You don’t want to save on hiring Best WordPress Hosting, this should be a priority in your budget. It is a fundamental investment that will determine how well your WordPress site will perform.
Ideally, the plan you choose should have enough resources for daily use and leave some headroom for future upgrades.
This way, you won’t have to worry about running out of storage space or your website going down when traffic is high.
Choose the server location closest to your target audience
The location of the server determines how quickly it can transfer and receive requests to load your website. While many strides have been made to improve connection speeds, latency continues to be a problem.
Latency is the amount of time it takes for web servers to receive and process a request for a web page. A significant influencing factor is the physical distance to the server.
High latency slows down websites and worsens the overall user experience. And this gets worse if your website has a lot of heavy content, such as images, animations, and videos. Latency becomes a more serious problem for users with slow or unstable Internet connections.
The most used Google Analytics plugin on WordPress sites is MonsterInsights. Installing MonsterInsights will add Google Analytics to your WordPress site and you will be able to view your website traffic metrics directly from the WordPress admin panel.
Use a content delivery network
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of geographically distributed servers that work together to speed up the process of delivering websites to users’ browsers.
A CDN shortens the distance between the user and the server, significantly reducing latency and increasing page speed.
A CDN stores copies of a website’s static content in cache memory. When a user visits the website, the closest server will load the content, reducing the number of external HTTP requests.
There are different CDNs you can sign up for. Some WordPress hosts offer CDN packages with their hosting.
One recommendation is the Cloudflare WordPress plugin , which is enabled on your hosting.
Deliver content over HTTP/2
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the basis of data communication on the World Wide Web. It is how clients and servers exchange information.
Fortunately, most WordPress Best WordPress Hosting providers already use HTTP/2 by default.
However, if you are not sure if your WordPress site uses HTTP/2, use the HTTP/2 testing tool and HTTP2.Pro to check. If it turns out that your website is still using HTTP/1, check if your web host offers HTTP/2 and contact them to start the migration.
Also, note that it is highly recommended to install an SSL certificate for HTTP/2.
Choose an optimized WordPress theme
The WordPress theme you use can influence the speed of your website. It is essential to choose a well-optimized theme to speed up your WordPress site.
To choose a quick WordPress theme , look at these items:
- Optimized code. To avoid any performance or security issues, make sure your theme code complies with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and WordPress standards.
- Light. A lightweight theme only comes with the necessary features. Your code should have minimal clutter, and the size of JavaScript and CSS files should ideally be less than 100 KB . Default WordPress themes generally fall into this category.
- Browser compatibility. Choosing a cross-browser compatible theme allows you to offer the best experience for any user. Unfortunately, not all WordPress themes can work well in different browsers.
- Mobile responsiveness. With more than half of all web traffic originating from mobile devices, responsiveness is important to ensure accessibility and attract visitors. Make sure your theme is responsive.
- AMP ready. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology allows WordPress sites to load faster on mobile devices.
Optimize Images
Without a doubt, images give life to our website. They are one of the best ways to attract attention, show off a product, or evoke a particular emotion.
However, large images can contribute significantly to the size of a page, slowing down download time.
Here are some tips to optimize images and speed up WordPress:
- Make sure the file size is 500 KB or less . Before uploading any image, please check the file size.
- Use the recommended file format . Different image formats use different file compression methods. Here are some of the most common image file formats and what they are best for:
- JPEG. JPEG files are best for sharing photos.
- PNG. PNG files are recommended for graphics and drawings.
- WebP . WebP is gaining popularity due to its ability to combine lossy and lossless compression. Using WebP, you can deliver a high-resolution image that is smaller than a JPEG or PNG file.
- Lazy loading images . When lazy loading is enabled, images on a page will load on demand. This improves site speed because the website does not have to load all the images at once, only when the user scrolls down to view them.
- Update WordPress core, plugins and themes regularly
By staying up to date with WordPress software updates, you’ll ensure that your website always has the latest performance and security improvements.
As an open source platform, WordPress unfortunately attracts hackers who are constantly looking for security vulnerabilities. As a result, keeping WordPress up to date is even more important.
Uninstall disabled plugins
Plugins extend the functionality of WordPress, making them great additions to a website. However, some plugins can be resource-intensive and impact performance. This is why you should avoid having too many WordPress plugins, making sure to delete the ones you no longer use.
Fewer plugins result in better performance. However, the quality of the plugin is equally important. A poor quality plugin can cause devastating performance issues. Therefore, it is imperative to do proper research beforehand. Make sure to delete the ones that are no longer in use.
Minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files often contain many empty spaces and redundant characters to make them more readable for developers. However, this can cause machines to process them more slowly. You can minify your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files using MinifyCode or the Fast Velocity Minify plugin.
Use the latest version of PHP
PHP 8.0 offers greater efficiency and performance, improving site speed. Your PHP version can be changed from the control panel of your hosting account.
PHP is a scripting language that allows developers to create dynamic and interactive websites.
Like any other software, PHP has been constantly updated since its first release. Each new version of PHP introduces performance and security improvements.
Optimize the WordPress database
Over time, your database will accumulate junk that can slow down your WordPress site. To optimize your WordPress database, use the tool in phpMyAdmin or a plugin like WP-DB Manager.
We hope this guide helps you apply best practices to speed up your WordPress site. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us.