There are many reasons why loading speed is truly important matter for any website managers. No one likes waiting for a website to load; as a result, you will lost your potential customers no matter how quality your products are. Moreover, slow loading speed also reduces your performance rankings in search engines. I am sure that you will not let this nightmare drive you to the edge anymore.
In this articles, there are some solutions mentioned in order that you can select the best way to improve your website performance. This topic may be familiar with many of you, although, I hope that this tutorial will give you new clues to speed up your WordPress site.
1. Select good hosts
Let’s start with a good host. It pays to have a good foundation for your website; however, benefits you receive are much greater than this number. An important question is that which host you should use. Before making a decision, you should consider some important key points: Which type of hosting is best for your website? Bandwidth and storage you will need? What about up-time, security and site speed of your hosting server?
Moreover, you should also consider about location of your web hosting server. You should select server nearest to the place where main your customers and visitors are. Choosing a good host will help to prepare a solid foundation to develop your website effectively.
2. Choose good themes
Fast and well-coded themes will be your best choices. However, many people enjoy using themes integrated a lot of functions and features which are not really necessary for them. In fact, using these themes can make your website loading speed slow. Especially, too many effects which have to use large amount of CSS and JavaScript will be one of main reasons slowing down your website speed.
What should be your suitable themes? Simple and solid themes should be your first choices. Consider about their features whether it meets your expectations.
3. Remove inactive plugins
It is never a good idea to keep unnecessary plugins on your server, even if they’re not in use. Instead, you should identify which plugins slow down your site and make decision to keep them, replace them or remove them completely. It does not mean that you will not use plugins anymore and find alternative codes instead. Plugins should be used but in an effective way.
Because many plugins are installed, it will take much time for your server to analyze codes of each plugins and list database stored in wp_options table. It obviously makes loading speed slow down. P3-Plugin Performance Profiler is a good solution for you to optimize your website.
4. Use an effective caching plugin
No matter how good or bad your host is, using caching plugins is always a necessary requirement. No one can bear with long loading and waiting.
Building your site with ease by taking advantage of caching plugins is an easy and effective way. A lot of them are on wordpress.org, so that you can select your suitable one. By far our favorite, WP Super Cache has all features you need to improve your site performance.
5. Optimize images
One of the main factors making your website speed slow significantly is images especially large images and wallpapers. This is indeed unnecessary to upload these images; instead, you can upload smaller images or take advantages of powerful applications to optimize your images.
Anyways, using a plugin will be much easier for you. One of the most powerful plugins you can take advantage of is WP Smush – a plugin helping you to strip hidden, bulk information from your images, reducing the file size without losing quality.
6. Optimize WordPress database
One of amazing native WordPress feature is automatic saving everything. With this feature, although it is convenient and time-saving for you to save your temporary content, your database will get filled with thousands of post revisions, trackbacks and trashed items pretty quickly.
Coming as a fantastic solution, WP Optimize plugin - an extensive WordPress database cleanup and optimization tool, will help you to routinely clear out your database’s trash and keep the database efficient. Remember that it is always the best practice to make a database backup before applying this program.
7. Enable Gzip and Browser Cache
Gzip is a useful method which allows you to compress your website’s files as ZIP files and send them to your browser. These zip files will be automatically extracted and show the content when a user visits your website. By this way, content transmitted from the server to the browser is far more efficient and saves a lot of page-loading time.
To enable Gzip, you can add following code to .htaccess file if you are using Shared Host or Apache:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
In case, you are using NGINX, make sure that these lines are added in nginx.conf file:
# Start Gzip compression gzip on; gzip_min_length 1100; gzip_buffers 4 32k; gzip_types text/plain application/x-javascript text/xml text/css; gzip_vary on; # End Gzip Compression
After installing, to check whether Gzip is enabled or how it works with your site, you can go to Check Gzip Compression and test your site.
You can also enable browser caches to improve your website performance. This method is an useful method to reduce the load times of pages by storing commonly used files from your website on your vistors’ browser. To turn on browser caching, you will find .htaccess file in the root of your domain and insert following code. Depending on your websites files you can set different expiry dates.
## EXPIRES CACHING ## ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year" ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days" ## EXPIRES CACHING ##
8. Minify CSS and Javascript files
Another solution for you to reduce the size of your website resources through minification. This process refers to removing unnecessary or redundant data without affecting how the resource is processed by the browser. Looking at the title, maybe you can feel confused, but now there is an ideal solution for you. Better WordPress Minify plugin will facilitate minification process and help you to combine all of your style sheets and JavaScript files into one, reducing the number of requests that the browser needs to make.
9. Move CSS to the top and JavaScript to the bottom
This method also improve your site performance by forcing files to be downloaded in the optimal order. Your CSS files are linked as close to the top of the page as possible; on the other hand, your JavaScript files are as close to the bottom of the footer as possible. Due to that, progressive rendering is blocked before the CSS files have been loaded and after your web server quickly renders the page, the browsers would execute JavaScript, then the overall loader would be faster. To practice this goal, it is required to have JavaScript knowledge or you can take advantages of a plugin called Scripts to Footer – a completely free WordPress plugin.
10. Replace PHP with static HTML
PHP is great idea to make a website efficient; however, there are some very generic code included. Calling information through PHP uses up server resources, then, slows down your site . Instead, you can replace this generic PHP code with some static HTML in order to decrease the number of database queries and this will make a big performance difference.
Here are some tips which can help you to improve your WordPress site performance, then, you can use GTmetrix to check your endeavor. If you have any other useful method, don’t hesitate to share with us in comment box. Let’s make our sites perfect together!