The Ultimate Guide to Boost The Performance of Your WordPress Site in 2020
WordPress is the most popular CMS based platform used for building the most appealing and impressive website across the globe. It offers thousands of WordPress plugins, themes, and extensions for your WordPress site to make it more stylish and fully functional as compared to others in the global market. With tons of advanced tools and features, WordPress allows you to build a professional-looking website, blog, and portfolio to make your website unique and different from other websites.
Just like everything around the globe is not perfect. There are certain tools and capabilities that should be included in WordPress for building a high-performing and fast loading website. We know well about the major problems that we get in a WordPress website is its low speed.
A high-performance website helps you increase sales and boost conversions but if your website has low speed, it will result in reducing conversion rates and sales in spite of getting high-traffic on your website. That’s because customers like to purchase from a fast-loading website where they don’t have to wait for anything they wish to shop. So, it’s very important to have an extremely fast-loading website in order to boost sales and conversions effectively. Our team of experts WordPress developers have researched and worked on how you can optimize your WordPress website to boost performance effectively.
Why Speed Up Your WordPress Website?
The speed of your WordPress website determines the performance and helps you to attract more and more customers to increase traffic and boost conversions effectively. An extremely fast-loading website helps you improve the ranking of your website into Google search engines by displaying your web pages at the top of its search results in the most effective way.
On the other hand, if your website has low speed and takes much time to load any web page, your customers will lose interest and will move to another website that is significantly faster than your website. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you get on your WordPress website. If you have not optimized your WordPress site for speed, you will not get high conversions and it will be a waste of your time, money, and effort you have spent in building your eCommerce WordPress site.
Thus, it is very important to optimize your WordPress site in order to get high-performance and extremely fast-loading speed to compete with your competitors effectively in the market.
Here in this article, we will tell you how to optimize your existing WordPress site to accelerate the performance and boost conversions effectively.
How to Check Speed of Your WordPress Website?
It is experienced that more than 80% of people think their website speed is decent. That's because it doesn't make them feel like they are having slow speed on their local computer. That's a big mistake they make.
It happens when you keep visiting your website using the same browsers that used to store the data of website in its local DNS server and help you load it significantly as you start typing them in the same browser. That means it doesn't load the entire page of your website, it helps you display the web content or information that is stored previously in its local domain name server which uses a cache to restore your website. That's a reason, you get your website load instantly when you start typing them in the search engines.
You will not get the same user experience if you visit your website using different devices or browsers. That's because you will be visiting it the first time or visiting your website using the fresh browser which you never visited your site earlier using the same browser or device.
That's why we recommend you to use IsitWP, an online tool for testing the speed of your WordPress site quickly and conveniently. It comes as free of cost and allows you to test your website speed more effectively.
Once you start testing your website, you will get an idea of how you need to optimize your WordPress site in order to get the extremely fast-loading website to stand out from the crowd.
Basically, the speed of any fast-loading website is considered 2 to 3 seconds max. The most website opens within a second when you browse them using any device or browser. So, you can optimize your website to load it as fast as you can in order to get an extremely fast-loading website across the world.
Choose a Reliable Hosting Plan
We recommend you to choose a reliable web hosting service for your WordPress which provides extremely excellent speed and support with powerful features and functionality.
When it comes to web hosting, there are various things which come into consideration before choosing any hosting plan for your website. Doesn't matter how wonderful and cost-effective hosting plans you get for your website if it doesn't fulfill your requirements. If you think that shared hosting can be the best option if you are planning to choose shared hosting for your website. That means you are misleading yourself. In fact, it costs you nothing and brings little improvement in website speed. Thus, it will slow down your website speed.
So, we recommend you to choose the best hosting provider that offers hosting services to a wide range of domain name registration, unlimited disk space, SSH access, data backup, Google app integration, free site transfer, etc. By knowing all these features about hosting, you can carry out the hosting process for your WordPress website to get high performance to boost sales and conversion rates effectively.
Optimize Your WordPress Database
By optimizing the database, you can optimize the speed of your WordPress website efficiently. It is quite a complicated task as it takes much time for developers to optimize the database of your WordPress website, especially when you do this job one by one manually.
When it comes to clear caches automatically, MySQL is considered the most important database that plays a vital role in cleaning unwanted files and database itself from time to time efficiently.
We recommend you to install the most stunning WordPress plugins such as WP-Optimize or WP-DB Manager to optimize your WordPress website powerfully. These stunning WordPress plugins will help you optimize and manage your whole database including tables, spam, post revisions, drafts, etc.
Moreover, you can set a date and time for optimizations regularly in WP-DB Manager in order to improve the performance of WordPress website to boost conversions like never before effectively.
Use of Content Delivery Network
Content Delivery Networks are the best known for its speed, they help you accelerate your website speed and allows you to load your web pages significantly faster than before on all devices across the world. CDN refers to a proxy network server that is spread across the world. It helps the end-user by delivering high-quality content when they browse the relevant information over the internet from anywhere and anytime. CDN not only helps you deliver your web content faster to the users but also enhances the security of your Wordpress site effectively. a process by copying the web content including images, CSS, Javascript, and many more from your website and delivering them to the users from the nearest servers.
There are thousands of CDN providers available in the market where CloudFlare, Amazon CloudFront, MaxCDN are the most prominent CDN across the globe. That's because it's simple to use and provides a unique and user-friendly dashboard more effectively.
If we talk about Cloudflare, it provides amazing features and functionality including an advanced control panel with added security standards, DNS, API, analytics, easy installation, smart pricing options, and excellent support quickly and effectively.
However, we recommend you to check out the main features before you go for a CDN provider so that you can easily decide and make their decision according to your needs efficiently.
Optimize Your Image Size
Images are one of the most significant factors that cause to reduce the speed of your web page. In order to improve the performance of your website, you need to optimize your image size as low as possible without losing image quality effectively. You can easily reduce image size by using online tools and plugins to optimize image size more effectively and quickly. It will take time and can be a little tricky if you reduce image size by doing it manually or using Photoshop, CorelDraw, etc.
Today, you can find thousands of online tools and plugins that cost you nothing to optimize your image size by using them effectively. They are easy to use and allow you to compress the size of your image according to your needs and requirements without compromising the image quality efficiently.
You can easily find the best online tools or plugins to optimize image size for your WordPress website quickly and effectively. This way, you can easily improve the performance of your website by using free online tools and plugins that best fit with your needs.
Minify JS and CSS Files
You will get email notifications to optimize the size of JS and CSS files if you use Google PageSpeed Insights tool for your WordPress website.
What this means is that by reducing the number of CSS and JS calls and the size of those files, you can improve the site loading speed.
You can also minimize the size of CSS and JS files by using study guides available online to help you optimize your file size. If you find the solution not meeting your needs after putting so much time and effort, you can go for WordPress plugins to do your next job efficiently.
By using online WordPress plugins or tools, you can optimize the size of your CSS, JS, and HTML files of your WordPress website effectively and conveniently.
Use advanced caching mechanisms with a caching plugin
WordPress caching plugins (e.g. W3 Total Cache) has been there for a long time, making the complex tasks of adding caching rules to your website elements easier. Combining such plug-ins with advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish could help you better the loading speed of your website and ultimately speed up WordPress website.
Enable GZIP compression
As you can save lots of disk quota by compressing your files into your local computer efficiently. Like the same way, you can compress the web pages by using GZIP compression in order to optimize the size of your web pages effectively.
By using GZIP compression, you can significantly reduce the bandwidth usage and improve the speed of your WordPress site by compressing thousands of files more effectively. It will help you unzip your website when it will be accessed by anyone and allow you to minimize your bandwidth usage to speed up your WordPress site in the most effective way. There are thousands of plugins that enable you to gzip compression.
For example, you can use plugins like PageSpeed Ninja which lets you enable GZIP compression more effectively. To get more effective results, you can find out the best plugins to enable GZIP compress for your WordPress website effectively.
Delete Unwanted Themes or Plugins
In order to get smooth functioning of your WordPress website, we recommend you to delete unwanted plugins or themes from your website. By removing unnecessary WordPress themes or plugins, you can significantly increase the performance of your WordPress website.
We recommend you to keep updated your website with all themes and plugins from time to time in order to get a smooth user experience effectively and suggest you use the high-performing WordPress plugins or themes which can help you enhance the performance of your WordPress site significantly faster than before.
For your website maintenance, you must have to check unnecessary plugins or themes and then you may carry out the process to delete all unwanted or deactivated plugins effectively. Keep in mind that some plugins keep additional data and do not remove easily so, you have to remove these additional files in order to delete them permanently. For safety reasons, we recommend you to take a backup before you start deleting plugins or themes from the dashboard. It will help you restore your files or plugins back to their positions in case any uncertainty occurs.
This way, you can easily keep your website up-to-date by cleaning unnecessary files, plugins, and themes from the dashboard and speed up your website to boost conversions effectively.
Final Word
That's it! We hope you have enjoyed reading this article and helped you know how to optimize the performance of your WordPress website more effectively. We recommend you to try all these techniques in order to speed up your WordPress site to boost performance. We would suggest you test your website speed before and after applying these techniques, so you may know how they can be helpful to accelerate the performance of your Wordpress website easily and effectively.
