8 Advanced Techniques to Speed Up Your WordPress Site Run Faster

When it comes to online users, they are rarely patient with slow-loading pages, and often, the web abandonment rate peaks on account of slow load speeds.

This is why you need to ensure that all the pages of your website load at optimal speeds and that your prospective leads/customers do not get to wait for more than a few seconds for the pages to load. If you are looking for ways to speed up the WordPress site, then you may want to check out the various tips and suggestions posted below.

Advanced Techniques to Speed Up Your WordPress Site Run Faster

1. PHP 7+:

If you are using the older variant, then you are missing out on something. When it comes to looking for ways to speed up your WordPress site, PHP7 happens to be one of your best bets; it comes along with Zend Engine 3.0 and can help your website perform a lot faster.

Using PHP7, you should be able to improve your load speed by as much as 50% and that’s a lot. That’s why you need to seriously consider utilizing PHP7 for your website and in the process give its performance a much-needed boost, as well.

2. Update your server software:

Naturally, when it comes to the question of how to speed up your WordPress site, one of the first things that you would need to do is to update all the requisite software. You may want to check and ensure that your WordPress software is running the latest version and that the same goes for your server software.

Running your website on outdated software can cause it to run slowly and can even cause problems down the road. So double-check and ensure that you are running the latest version of software that’s currently available.

3. Set up your website on VPS:

One of the reasons that your website could suffer from slow load speeds could well be because you are on shared hosting. Sure, shared hosting costs less, and sounds like it is too good to be true.

And in a sense it is, for all that it would take for your website to slow down is to have a certain number of people land on your website, and soon everything comes to a complete stop. This is why it makes sense to opt for VPS or a virtual private server.

A virtual private server is not like shared hosting nor is it as expensive as dedicated hosting can be – it is somewhere in between. And that’s why when it comes to speeding up your WordPress site; you need to opt for a virtual private server.

As a result, your pages should load a lot faster than before. Granted that the VPS route may be slightly more expensive than opting for shared hosting, but it should provide you with more resources, and in the process help your website handle more requests easily.

4. Caching plugin:

This is one handy plugin that is a must, especially when you are considering various ways to speed up your WordPress site. A caching plugin will capture your dynamic content and render a static HTML-based version of the same. This will enable your pages to load much faster, and help your website handle more requests easily.

5. Troubleshooting plugins:

And of course, if you end up installing one too many plugins on your website or if the plugins ‘act up’, then it can cause your website to slow down. This is why it is essential that you troubleshoot your plugins, and remove all the unnecessary ones from your website.

It is essential that you trim down the plugins retain what’s required, and get rid of the excess. This should enable you to speed up your website; for example, if you had just recently installed a new plugin and you noticed your website slowing down – then chances are that the new plugin is the cause and one that you need to remove right away.

6. Use excerpts rather than full content:

The other neat trick that you can do is to utilize excerpts instead of displaying the full post on the home page. You should be able to do this easily in WordPress by tinkering with the settings. By opting to display summaries with a “read more” link added at the end, you should be able to increase the speed of your website.

7. Divide comments into pages:

If you have a popular blog post, then the one thing that you can be sure of is that you will get a lot of comments for the same. And as other users comment more on the post; this can impact the speed of your website.

But WordPress has a solution for the same. All that you have to do is to divide up the comments into several pages and this should help you optimize your post and even help improve the performance of your website as a whole.

8. Lazy loading:

It is a good idea to install some lazy loading plugins on your website; what these plugins do is that they prevent all the images and media files on your website from being loaded at the same time.

Instead, with these plugins, the images and media files load onto the page only as you scroll down the page. This can help load up your page a lot faster and should enable your customers to have a better user experience, as a result.

These are some of the things that you can do to speed up your WordPress website. It is advised that you check the speed of your web pages regularly and see that they load at optimal speeds.

Remember, most online users have short attention spans, and given this, it is in your interest to ensure that your page loads within a few seconds. And remember, at the end of the day, you are trying to provide your customers with a better user experience and slow loading pages tend to have the opposite effect.

Related Post: WordPress Lazy Loading: How to Add it to Your Site