Learning how to speed up WordPress is an essential skill for any website owner. Page loading speed influences everything from traffic to bounce rate to conversions, user satisfaction and, ultimately, profits.
Here are a few tips to ensure your website is loading properly:
Step 1. Update WordPress and plugins
Each version of the CMS comes with new features, bug fixes and more. They make your website run more efficiently and prevent it from slowing down too much. You should always keep your WordPress up to date!
You can do this by logging into your admin area and click on the “Updates” option.
On the next page, update everything that has one available.
Step 2. Check your internet connection
It would be best to check your connection speed to confirm whether or not it is slow. It is easy to forget at times that our own internet quality is an important factor.
Both download and upload speeds should be good for a site to load properly. If you are using a mobile device, be sure to disconnect from the WiFi and use the mobile network instead.
If your speeds are fine but your latency (ping) is high then there is a problem that your ISP should attend to as this can also affect your experience.
Step 3. Optimize Images
Images often make up the bulk of a page. That’s natural since they need more space than text or CSS. For that reason, in order to speed up WordPress, it is crucial that you learn how to make them as small as possible without losing quality, or what is called compression. If you are using cPanel, follow this article to optimize your content.
Step 4. Don’t Upload Audio/Video Files Directly to WordPress
This will increase your website quite dramatically and can easily impact load times. Instead, upload the video to a platform like YouTube who has much better servers to host video content and embed the URL into your site. Consult your web developer regarding this should you be unsure.
Step 5. Enable Page Caching
Use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache. WordPress dynamically creates an HTML version of your pages whenever someone requests to see them. Since that is one of the things that slows it down, it would make sense to have the finished page at hand all the time which is what this plugin does.
To install a plugin, you can search for it via your WordPress admin area.
We can also assist you in identifying possible high server load or network problems on our side.