The modern digital world emphasizes efficiency and agility and your WordPress website is no exception either. Slow website speed hits your website’s interests in more than one.
In light of this fact, WordPress developers and designers advise businesses to keep their websites up to date and follow certain simple hacks to speed up their WordPress website.
Without further ado, let’s have a gander at these wonderful tricks.
1. Perform a speed diagnosis
The first key step to WordPress speed optimization is running a speed diagnosis to understand how quickly your website loads. There are several tools available to run a speed diagnosis. There are amazing tools i.e. WP Engine Speed Tool, Page Speed Insights, and GTmetrix that help you analyze the speed of your website and find out the reasons causing the slowdown.
You must also schedule recurring tests to keep track of your website’s performance against any changes made recently.
2. Uninstall plugins and themes no longer used
If you keep the plugins and themes on your website up-to-date, you must pat yourself. Besides, you should also uninstall the plugins and themes no longer used.
Unused plugins and themes not only slow down your website quite significantly but also affect its overall performance. You should first deactivate the plugins and then uninstall them.
To remove unused themes, you will need to go to the Appearance section on your dashboard. There you will find the themes installed in the past and the ones not in use anymore can be deleted in just a click.
3. Keep your database up to date
Often overlooked, your database keeps accumulating unwanted clutter with the time passage. This consumes a huge amount of space on your website causing a speed slump.
Website optimization calls for regular cleanups and reducing the database size. Here a quick pro tip is that you must use a plugin to safely clean up the clutter.
Manual database clean-up through phpMyAdmin can pose a risk of deleting crucial data elements if you don’t know what you are doing.
And hence if you aren’t tech-savvy, you should leave the job to a professional or use a plugin to get it done for you. Plugins such as WP Sweep efficiency clean up spam comments, MySQL queries, and revisions made in the past to help your database achieve its optimum state.
4. Reduce the file size of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Your website speed optimization mission is incomplete without minifying the code of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
The backend of your website gets optimized through minification, which is a process that eliminates unnecessary line breaks, comments, spaces, and characters.
When done the right way, these files load quicker and so do your web pages. Again, there are numerous good plugins such as Autoptimize and WP Rocket at your disposal for this purpose.
5. Choose a fast server
Make sure to choose a dedicated server over a small server with restricted resources. One of the key steps to optimize your website’s speed is selecting the right hosting provider.
You might want to know that a lethargic and small server can not execute tasks such as running database queries and executing codes as efficiently and quickly as a dedicated server can.
Also, Check-Out: Top 6 WordPress Web Development Trends That Will Prevail In 2022
6. Consider a CDN
A Content Delivery Network a.k.a CDN is a great way to pace up your website and to your delight, there are several options at your disposal. From mobile optimization to traffic analytics, mobile optimization and a global network for serving fast DNS are some of the salient features you can leverage.
7. Delete Unused Media and Compress Files
Refrain from using large-sized media files on your website as they potentially slow down your WordPress website. Delete unused media files to see the difference by yourself and if choosing which media to delete becomes difficult, you should consider compressing media files.
If you are looking for free media optimization plugins to help you achieve your target, there are plenty of them out there.
8. Update your Website from Time to Time
It is highly recommended to keep your WordPress updated at all times. From plugins to themes and new patches, every little aspect is important in the process. You are also advised to test the update on a staging website before it is applied to your WordPress website.
Conclusion
Your WordPress website is one of the key marketing assets for your business and it must perform with utmost efficiency like all the departments of your organization. Website optimization plays a pivotal role and contributes to your bottom line.
For more information related to WordPress theme customization or website optimization, feel free to touch base with us to know our Website Maintenance Plan
