To change it a bit, an article on WordPress and a few tips to follow in order to speed up the loading speed of your WordPress site. The goal is to make the loading of the site faster by reducing the latter. Some recommendations require minimal technical knowledge with coding.
How to speed up and optimize WordPress?
Table of Contents
- 1 How to speed up and optimize WordPress?
- 1.1 1. Choose a light and well-designed theme
- 1.2 2. Don’t weigh down your WordPress site
- 1.3 3. Website security audit & use a Security plugin
- 1.4 4. Limit external calls
- 1.5 5. Compress your images
- 1.6 6. A good cache policy.
- 1.7 7. Keep an eye on the most viewed items
- 1.8 8. Extensions to optimize WordPress
- 1.9 9. Code optimizations
- 1.10 10. Theme optimization
- 1.11 11. Google Fonts
- 1.12 12. Use a CDN
1. Choose a light and well-designed theme
Now you have the links to test the speed of your website. The first tip is to use a light and well-designed theme. To do so, do not hesitate to set up a test site or test the demo links for the themes offered.
A good theme should not exceed 500 KB in size. Beyond that, this greatly penalizes the speed of page loading. So take the time to choose the theme and then improve the WordPress speed. Some themes include SEO optimization options (minification, lazy images).
2. Don’t weigh down your WordPress site
The choice of theme and extensions are important since if they are badly coded, they can cause big problems. WordPress is evolving a lot, if the theme is old, it will not use the latest features. It can play a lot. I advise you to pass your themes on PageSpeed, if the scores are below 75, I think you can already drop the theme.
As for extensions, like programs on Windows, avoid installing many, this will weigh down your WordPress site. Likewise, if you need to add a new extension, submit it to PageSpeed to see the impacts.
3. Website security audit & use a Security plugin
Website security audit helps you to determine loopholes on your website that can lead to hacking. You can spend hours optimizing your site but a hack can take away your year of hard work in just a second. Follow the mentioned link to perform a WordPress Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing.
Complete website security tools like Getastra, etc. can help you to protect your website from being hacked.
4. Limit external calls
PageSpeed tests the entire site, as well as external links. Already, these sites are not with you, you do not control anything, so if the server starts to row or if it is coded in any way, your site will suffer. It can also slow down the visitor’s WEB browser, if the script is badly done.
At a minimum, the scripts called must be asynchronous to reduce the blocking of the page loading. Multiply calls, requests for DNS resolutions (even if they are likely to be the visitor’s cache) and queries, this has an impact on the loading speed of your WordPress pages.
Avoid as much as possible external scripts. For example, for social media sharing buttons, host them at your home instead of installing an extension or choose the right one.
5. Compress your images
Image compression is important, PageSpeed will notify you if images are poorly compressed.
So make a habit of saving your images with a suitable compression rate. This should not exceed 25kb.
There are many extensions to optimize the images, often with a charge depending on the volume of images to be optimized.
6. A good cache policy.
PageSpeed also checks the cache rules, so that the images, scripts, etc. are well hidden on the visitor’s WEB browser. This is all the more important for mobile devices. When the visitor returns to your WEB site, the images will be taken from his cache and not from the remote server. Save time and bandwidth.
7. Keep an eye on the most viewed items
The majority of your traffic can come from 20% of your content. Basically, a few articles can have a large audience. Pamper these items to make them faster.
Audience measurement tools like Google Analytics, Piwik etc. can help you identify top articles.
8. Extensions to optimize WordPress
We are attacking some code changes and one or two extensions. Be aware that these modifications can cause big problems, test well on all WEB browsers. There are of course other cache extensions that do this automatically.
9. Code optimizations
Here are some examples of code optimization for advanced users; Again, cache extensions provide these functions by default.
10. Theme optimization
It should be understood that the code modifications are done most of the time in the function.php file of your theme.
(On certain topics the latter can also call a specific page hooks-filters.php).
WordPress offers hook functionality that allows you to perform an additional action and thus modify the behavior of the site.
11. Google Fonts
There remains the case of Google Fonts, there it is a little more complex. Google Fonts are fonts accessible by Google APIs. Clearly, when you connect to a WordPress site that uses these, external calls are made.
PageSpeed may flag these calls. You must host the Google Fonts yourself, so you should first identify the Google fonts used. PageSpeed should do this for you in detail, otherwise, look at the external calls made by your WordPress site.
The Remove Google Fonts References extension allows you to disable Google Fonts calls for your themes.
12. Use a CDN
CDNs are networks of servers that allow you to speed up the speed of your site via caches.
Depending on the size of your WEB site, you may consider using these.
So this are some of the ways by which you can control your website speed and optimize it more for good results and low bounce rate.