Why Having a Fast Website Is Crucial:
The biggest issue with having a slow website is that your users will often lose patience and leave. This negatively affects your bounce rate, which reflects the number of visitors who click away after only seeing one page. Nearly half of users expect sites to load in two seconds or less, and 40% will leave a site if it hasn’t loaded within three seconds. In addition, a delay of just one second can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions
What Causes Your Site to Slow Down?
If your server is slow or experiences frequent downtimes, so will your site. We’ll discuss how hosts and plans affect your site in more detail soon, but it’s worth repeating that picking a quality host is a necessity. We also recommend that you consider robust hosting, which ensures that your site is fast, responsive, and reliable.
How to Test Your Site’s Current Speed:
We recommend that you give gtmetrix.com a try. This is a free speed-checking tool that can be incredibly useful. It also provides more in-depth metrics and even offers optimization suggestions based on your results.
What are 10 Ways to Optimize Your WordPress Website for Speed?
Lets Find out!
1 Choose a high quality server
Picking the right VPS plan is one of the first and most important choices you’ll make for your website. Since your web host is where your site lives, it will do a lot to determine your site’s speed, performance, and how well it can cope with high traffic.
2 Always Keep Your Plugins, Themes, and WordPress Software Updated
It’s essential not to ignore updates when they become available, whether they’re core updates for your WordPress installation or new versions of your WordPress theme or plugins. The most important reason for this is security as new updates will ensure that your site is safe against the latest threats.
3 Implement Caching to Reduce the Number of Requests Your Site Handles
Caching may sound pretty technical, but it’s actually easy to implement on a WordPress site. There are several plugins you can use to do this. WP Super Cache is by far the most popular caching plugin; it’s both entirely free and very simple to configure.
Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
4 Use Image Optimization to Make Your Media Files Smaller
Image optimization is a process that compresses the size of an image file without noticeably affecting its quality. This is easy to implement, and you can even automate the process entirely. The first method you can use is to optimize your images before you even upload them to your site. We recommend TinyPNG because it’s free and very easy to use.
Link: https://tinypng.com/
5 Minify and Compress Your Website’s Files
for a WordPress site, the best option is usually a plugin. You have plenty of options at your disposal, but one of our favorites is Fast Velocity Minify. This is a free, open-source, and very user-friendly tool
Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/fast-velocity-minify/
6 Use a Content Delivery Network to Deliver Your Site’s Large Files
We recommend Stackpath (Paid) or Cloudflare (Free)
7 Only Use High-Quality Themes and Plugins
Even WordPress themes can affect your site’s speed. Many themes may sell themselves as “optimized” or “fast loading” without being either. Some themes include unneeded functionality or require more files than usual to function, which can also cause your site’s performance to suffer.
Choosing well-coded themes and high-quality plugins comes down to careful research. Make sure to check out user reviews and ratings, look at the developer’s update history, and make sure that each tool is tested to work with your version of WordPress. Adhering to these simple criteria will help ensure that you don’t install anything on your site that might slow it down
8 Delete Unused Themes and Plugins
This a site maintenance task you should perform regularly. Even if a theme or plugin isn’t active on your site, it will still take up space on your server and cause unnecessary strain. Plus, keeping unnecessary content around can get confusing for administrators
9 Clean Up Your Media Library and Post Revisions (Delete unused files)
We recommend that you use the Media Cleaner plugin Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/media-cleaner/
10 Optimize Your Databases
This task is technical and requires knowledge about databases. but There’s a plugin for almost anything, after all, and this task is no exception. Even if you’re a complete newbie, you can use the WP-DBManager plugin to manage your databases. This plugin will optimize, repair, and delete unused databases for you
Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-dbmanager/