For every webmaster, this is the main priority to make the site faster because a faster site not only increase your conversions, but also provide a better experience for your visitors which resulting in fewer bounces. Page Speed also affects your SEO and search engine rankings. A faster site gain more traffic and visitors.
How to increase page load speed wordpress
You can check your page loading time with the help of Pingdom.
In WordPress, You can reduce your page load time by applying following tactics.
For Increasing Page load speed time, we focus on three aspects:
- Reduce HTTP Requests
- Reduce Page size
- Enable cache and apply other tactics for fast render
Minimize the number of HTTP requests:
For better page speed, it is necessary to reduce the number of HTTP request. when someone visits your site the browser sent the requests to downloading resources for serving page to the visitor. If the cookies set for your domain the unnecessary traffic sent by the browser for downloading static resources. High numbers of requests resulted in the slow page speed. So best practice is that eliminate everything which is unnecessary, reduce the static resources and make sure serving static content from cookie free domain like images, CSS, JS files etc.
Reduce the number of plugins you use on your site:
When we start a blog or website we installed a lot of plugins for different functionality but most of the plugins are unnecessary and we can avoid these plugins by custom scripts. Some plugins installed their own stylesheets and javascript and increased the page size and redirects which resulted in slow page load time.
Identify Plugins that are slowing site down:
Identify and eliminate plugins which are slowing your site down. Many plugins are high resources consuming and increase the response time. We can identify these poorly configured plugins with the help of P3 Profiler plugin in WordPress.
Optimize and Specify Image Dimensions:
Many of bloggers upload the images in default sizes which increase the page size and reduce the load time. For better Page load time, Images should be compressed. If you have the lack of knowledge of Photoshop you can optimize your images by JPEG Optimizer and Tinypng. Yahoo ‘smushit’ is an another service and plugin which reducing image size without losing quality.
If you required 350×125 dimension image and your image dimension is 600×250, resize it in the correct dimension. Never resize in the HTML. If you resize in HTML, browser has to download the full-size image. Combining all of the images into a single image with the help of CSS Sprites can reduce a lot of HTTP request and serve faster page.
Enable Cache and Minification:
By enabling cache and using CDN for static resources, we can serve fast loading page. In WordPress, W3 Total Cache Plugin can do all of the stuff for fast loading page. you can minify and combine all of the Javascript and CSS files and Put stylesheets at the top and scripts at the bottom of the page. Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript can save many ms for loading page. Cloudflare is a free CDN service for fast serving static resources.
Use browser caching:
When someone visit a website, the elements on the page are stored on viewer’s hard drive in a cache, or temporary storage, which results in a faster load time. when the visitor returns browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server.
Optimize Database:
We earlier discuss how to optimize database in WordPress and reduce 86% of database size after optimization. Neat and clean database is very important for faster pages. By disable the post revision and increase the autosave interval you can save a lot of space of the database.
Gzip and compress components
Compress files at the server level before sending them to browsers. In Cpanel, you can do it with a single click. Login to Cpanel. Click optimize website under software/Services and select compress all contents. You can do it by adding these lines into the .htaccess file.
#Begin gzip and deflate <IfModule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/plain text/xml image/x-icon </IfModule>
Minimize on-page components:
Page size plays very important role in Faster site. Reduce the on page components like flash, stylesheets, and scripts which are unnecessary and slow a page’s load time.
Review your hosting plan and Choose a good host:
If you have a lot of traffic and your hosting plan has limited resources to fulfill requirements of those traffic, this result in the slow loading page and down site. So review your hosting plan and choose a good host who provides a better hosting environment. Netzole Hosting provide you Speed, Scalability and Security. Here is a list of best hosting packages for WordPress.