How to Optimize Speed of Your WordPress Website


Optimizing speed of your website sounds logical. In this article, we will talk about how we can boost the speed score of our WordPress site. It’s easy and following these steps, WordPress admin can easily increase the speed score. A slow website can harm your business and when it is simple like four steps, why not make it right away.
 
wordpress-website

Analyze your Site speed

The first thing to do is analyze the speed of your site with Gtmetrix(https://gtmetrix.com/)

You will get a complete analysis of your website. You can even analyze posts of your website. With this report, you will have an idea in which area you need to work on. Anything below 90 is not good for your website.

Let us go step by step to increase your website speed: 

Install W3 Total Cache

This WordPress plugin is the best WordPress caching plugin. This plugin will save some html, css, JavaScript files to the browser of the user. Next time when user will open the website, the browser will instantly load the page using these static files. This can really increase the speed of your site many times.

Once the plugin is installed you need to turn on page cache, object cache, database cache and minify under the general settings. Under the browser cache enable cache control header, an entity tag, set expires header. And this will automatically increase the speed of your page. 

Fix Gravatar issues

Gravatar is to show your avatar in the comments. This is free of cost, preinstalled WordPress service. If you turn the Gravatar off, your webpage will look quite boring or plain.

There is a plugin Nix Gravatar cache which fixes all the gravatar related issues automatically. It works very smooth and requires no additional efforts.

Image optimization

Large size images on your site can slow down your website to load. It is always recommended to use medium size images and optimized as well. With WordPress site, you do not have to worry about this. There are some plugins which you can install which will automatically optimize the image you will upload. Plugins like WP smushit and EWWW Image optimizer are two very great plugins to optimize the image on your site.

Another very effective and flexible tool is imageoptim. It will optimize your images in the best possible way. All you have to do is launch the application and drag n drop the images. It will start compressing the images to the possible extent. This is slightly inconvenient that simple plugins, however, it is more effective.

You can also specify the dimensions in the WordPress while uploading the image. You do not need any additional image for that.

JQuery with CDN

JQuery is the most used WordPress JavaScript library. These JavaScript libraries are hosted on Google’s CDN. There is a plugin called “Use Google Libraries”, which will help you to decrease latency, better cache and manage parallelism with these JavaScript files.

You just need to install and activate this plug and it will do all for you automatically.

With these 3- 4 steps, you will be able to increase the speed score of your website to 98-99%. These are just a few techniques, you can explore more. Your webpage should load faster to increase the user experience on your page. Nobody likes to wait for more than a second to check the website as they can always go back to check another site. I would suggest testing the website score as well as page speed score in every few days to maintain your website.


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