Introduction
According to Matt Davies Stockton, fast websites are able to retain and attract more users than slow ones. That’s why you need to make sure that your WordPress website is snappy and responsive. Let’s figure out how you can optimize performance for your WordPress site.
The Details
- Get a reliable hosting provider – A reliable web hosting provider lays the foundation for a fast WordPress site or any website. Make sure to choose a reputed hosting provider that offers flexible plans and meets your performance needs and bandwidth. While shared hosting plans are usually the cheapest, you share the bandwidth with a bunch of other websites. If you have a lot of content and get regular traffic on your website, a managed hosting plan or a dedicated virtual private server would help cut down on your loading time immensely.
- Delete unnecessary plugins – Quality manages to beat quantity in most cases, including those of WordPress plugins. Think of each plugin as a mini software or an app that eats up the resources of the hosted server. If you’ve got too many of them, they are going to significantly increase the losing speed. That’s why you need to get rid of unnecessary plugins. Test your website after deleting each such plugin and check how it affects your website’s performance, appearance, or functionality.
- Use a lightweight theme – Similar to plugins, themes can also eat up resources. If you have a resource-hungry theme with excessive animations, high-quality images, and inefficient programming, it’s going to slow down performance. Instead, get a simple theme that doesn’t have unnecessary features and has an efficient design to eat up minimal resources.
- Optimize your images – Large images cost you tens or hundreds of megabytes of data. If you have too many of them, your website may take a performance hit. That’s why you need to reduce the file size of images without degrading the quality. There are several free editing software that allows you to efficiently downscale the images without making them grainy or making your users squint their eyes at big screens.
- Use third-party services for video hosting – large high-quality images eat up your resources. However, they have nothing on videos. Even the lowest quality and low-resolution videos can slow down your website significantly. However, videos are a great tool for increasing audience engagement.
That’s why it’s best to use third-party hosting services like Vimeo or YouTube to host your videos instead of hosting them directly on your website. Doing this doesn’t change a thing for the end-user. You simply use the storage and performance of third-party services and embed the link in your website. Your users get a smooth experience, and your website doesn’t take a performance hit.
Conclusion
Matt Davies Stockton suggests that you use all the methods in your arsenal to optimize the performance of your website. Get rid of unnecessary plugins, use a lightweight theme, optimize images and do everything you can to bring the website loading speed down to two seconds or less.
