How to Speed Up WordPress a Beginners Guide for Faster Website Experience

When it comes to setting up your first WordPress website, it is important that you ensure that your pages load fast since online users often do not stick around if the pages take too long to load. Hence we are going to tell you how to speed up WordPress website.

There are a few things that you can do to improve the performance of your website and in the process, help boost the conversion rate on your pages.

According to Bing, even a 2% drop in page responsiveness can lead to reduced customer satisfaction and those customers are not bound to return back to your website anytime soon.

According to a recent study, it has been found that most online users rarely spend more than a few seconds surfing websites online.

That works out to a few seconds per page and if your website takes longer to load, then you are going to lose out in terms of prospective customers as well s traffic. This is why you need to check out ‘how to speed up WordPress, a beginners guide’.

Guide for Speed Up WordPress a Beginners for Faster Website Experience

1. Good host:

The first thing that you need to do is to ensure that you have a good web host in place. You can always opt for shared hosting but this leads to sluggish load times more often than not which is why it makes sense to invest in a good web hosting plan.

A sluggish load time can impact your competitiveness in the long run so investing in a good web host makes more sense.

2. Solid theme:

It is important that you go with a lightweight WordPress themes as it can help your website load a lot faster.

Basically, what you need is a basic theme that comes loaded with advanced functionality, with basic features so that it gets indexed faster and the load time is lightning fast.

Just remember that the more plugins you have on your pages, the longer it will take to load which inevitably leads to loss of prospective customers. This is really important step in helping one on speed up WordPress website.

3. Cache plugin:

There are lots of cache plugins available and you should be able to use the same to get your pages to load faster.

They help to drastically improve your page load time and you should be able to improve the performance of your website in the process. All you need to do is to download and install the required cache plugin on your website and you should be set.

4. Content delivery network:

One of the great things about content delivery network or CDNs as they are called is that it allows your customers to download all the static files on your website a lot faster.

This should result in better performance of your website as a whole which is why it makes sense to opt for a content delivery network; they are reasonably priced and easy to set up as well.

5. Optimize images:

These days, all the content on your website needs to be optimized. It is no longer a case of just optimizing the textual content on your website. There are quite a few plugins including the WP-SmushIT which enables you to optimize the image as you upload it.

There are other plugins that you can use as well which should enable you to optimize the images automatically and without any hassle.

6. Optimize home page:

You can also optimize your homepage to ensure that it loads faster. For starters, you can ensure that your homepage carries excerpts rather than whole posts, reduce the number of posts on your home page (5-7), remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page, remove inactive or less used widgets and plugins that you do not need from your home page.

You can also keep the overall number of widgets and plugins on your website to a minimal amount as the readers are here mostly for the content. Since homepage contains your main SEO keyword you should focus first on homepage to speed up WordPress and then on other pages

7. Optimize your WordPress database:

One of the reasons that your WordPress site is sluggish is that you need to optimize your WordPress database. The good news is that there are a few plugins designed just for this purpose like the WP-Optimize plugin.

This plugin optimizes your database so that your website continues to run efficiently and smoothly with faster load times than before.

8. Disable hot linking or leeching:

Online users often scrape images off your content and this is often termed as hot linking or leeching. And this inevitably places more stress on your server and can cause your website to load sluggishly.

The one way to prevent this is to head over to your root directory, access your ht access file and include the code posted below.
Place this code in your root .htaccess file:

disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?sparringmind.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?feeds2.feedburner.com/sktthemes [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

You’ll notice I included my feed (from FeedBurner), you’ll need to replace it with your feed’s name, otherwise your images won’t appear correctly there.

9. Expires header:

By adding expires header, you get to specify how much time that other users’ browsers have to fetch static content such s javascript pages among others from your website. This should enable you to function seamlessly and in the process, get your pages to load a lot faster.

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

The above numbers are set for a month (in seconds), you can change them as you wish.

10. Lazy load:

Adding lazy load to your website makes a lot of sense; essentially with lazy load, the images load on to the main screen as the user views them and the other images load up as the user scrolls down.

By adding this feature, you should be able to cut down on the load time substantially especially if you have a lot of images hosted on your website. Lazy load can really help you speed up WordPress site.

11. Revision:

Did you know that WordPress saves all revisions indefinitely and naturally this adds more stress on your server.

So use a revision plugin and ‘trim the fat’ so as to speak, it should help cut down on all extra revisions stored on your server, that you no longer need.

These are some of the ways by which you can get your speed up WordPress website to load faster at lightning speeds.