How to increase speed of a wordpress website, Tips to know what makes website loading slower

Page speed is one of the 200 factors of search ranking, it not only affects search ranking but also user experience. If your website is loading slow that means you are losing visitors, besides your website content is awesome and you have great things to offer on your website, if page loading speed is slow people may leave your website before entering and interacting with your website content. Some people also suggest that internal links also play a role in loading page but it is not widely accepted.

Some web owners may not consider page loading speeds if their website is up running with no apparent issues, but regularly checking website speed is important for your visitors and search engines, search engines may not like your website ranking higher because of slow speed.

How to test your website for page loading speeds

There are handful of free online tools to check your website page speed. Most famous are Google page speed test, pingdom and  GTmetrix. You might get good score on one of the tools but having good score on all the tools is necessary, it clarifies any doubts that your website is slow. If the page loading speed is slow Google will suggest you with some tips to optimize your site but before everything else start from here….,

1- Check for the theme first

If your theme is slow and have problems loading by default then all the suggestions would go in trash and you would be able to only increase the speed marginally by employing page speed techniques. More often webmasters blame hosting when they complete all suggested solutions and page speed remains the same. Although good web hosting is an important factor which reflects upon the page speed but in most cases hosting is not the core issue. You will get to know this by changing different available themes. Try a few lightweight fast loading themes and run the page speed test to see if works. If the speed increases exceptionally then you don’t need to go through all the suggested solutions. You will definitely fix your website speed by changing the theme permanently. If your website speed remains the same or improves little then you have to go through the following solutions.

2- Deactivate all the plugins installed, remove unnecessary plugins

After the first common factor in slowing down page speed which is theme itself the next important factor comes in which is plugin or plugins. Many poor plugins may reduce the website performance, to check this deactivate all of your installed plugins and run the page speed test after. If it improves the speed by 10 to 30 percent then you need to see which plugins are causing the trouble. Now activate the plugin one by one and conduct a speed test after activating, this way you will find exactly which plugin specifically creating problem. If you find that plugin, refrain from using it again or find any other alternate plugin. Another thing to consider if you have tons of plugins installed and not using them or the plugins you are using are not necessary, remove those plugins to increase the speed.

3- Use effective caching plugin

If you haven’t installed any caching plugin on your wordpress then do not delay to install it. Caching plugin deletes cache files on your WordPress and helps it to perform better and speed up your page loading. There are handful of good caching plugins out there you can check for the best caching plugins and install which one is good for you. Some of good the caching plugins are Wp super cache, wordpress fastest cache and hyper cache

4- Use optimized images

Heavy images on your site can slow it down marginally, avoid using heavy images or large sizes. But images also spice up website and blog posts so using low quality images is not a solution to that. You may use plugins to compress images which may not affect the quality of image. There are many image optimizing plugins that you can use. Here are few best image optimization plugins: WP Smush.it, EWWW image optimizer, SEO friendly images and CW image optimizer.

5- Minify CSS, HTML and Java Script

Some wordpress themes relies heavily on CSS, HTML and Java Scripts which makes website loading slower. You need to minify those elements which would help the page loading faster than normal. To do this job there are also free plugins available in wordpress. Some best minify plugins are; WP minify fix and Better WordPress minify.

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