How to stay fast on your WordPress site

Why the performance of your site should be a priority

Many factors shape your site’s way of experiencing people, such as its design and content. Performance, however, may be the most significant single component in this equation.

By’ efficiency,’ we’re talking about how fast the pages of your site are loading and how well it holds up under a lot of traffic at the same time. Slow and unreliable sites tend to drive out of frustration tourists. The slower your site is, the higher is likely to be your’ bounce rate’ (the amount of individuals left after watching a single page briefly).

If slow page speeds scare off your crowd, the layout and content of your website will not matter. Therefore, it is essential to guarantee that your site always performs well, whether one or a hundred people view it. Luckily, to make that happen, you don’t have to be tech-savvy.

5 Ways to preserve the performance of your WordPress site

In the past, we looked at some particular ways of maintaining your WordPress site. Now, we’re going to concentrate on the best methods to maintain high efficiency. Keep in mind that while we’ll be focusing on WordPress-specific tools, many of the following strategies apply just as well to sites built on any platform.

The first thing you’ll want to do is test your site, to see where its current performance is at. With that information in hand, you can start taking steps to shorten its loading times.

1. Keep up to date with your WordPress version

We put this specific method first for a reason. If the underlying architecture of your site holds it back, all the performance-boosting tips in the world won’t assist.

Developers of WordPress release regular platform updates, and keeping your site on the recent version is essential. This is important for security reasons, but it also helps to maintain your site’s performance. Many updates release tweaks and optimizations that are key to ensuring smooth loading times.

What’s more, an out – of-date WordPress installation is more likely to conflict with visitors’ browsers, as well as newer versions of plugins and themes. This can slow your site down, and even break various features.

Updating WordPress is easy, and when a fresh version is prepared, your dashboard will show a notification:

WordPress Update Notification

2. Optimize images of your website

Different kinds of content and characteristics may slow down your website. Few components, however, have as much effect as pictures and other media. Image files tend to be large and‘ heavy’, which means they’ll take longer to render–slowing down the entire page loading process.

This is especially relevant if you have a lot of images on your site, and if those images are big or high-quality. That said, you ‘re probably using all that media for a reason. Including lots of imagery in your content is an excellent way to grab visitors’ attention and increase engagement.

You can optimize all the pictures of your site to get the best of both worlds. This decreases their file sizes without substantial quality decrease. There are lots of WordPress plugins, such as the famous EWWW Image Optimizer, that can assist you do this:

EWWW Image Optimizer

Such plugins can even automate the process, optimizing every new image you upload. This can save you a lot of time, preventing your media from slowing down your websites to crawl.

3. Implement a caching solution

A number of things need to happen when someone visits one of the pages of your site. First, your browser will send a request to the server of your site. Then, the server sends along the necessary data required to build the page. When all of that information arrives, the page can be displayed to the visitor.

Sometimes, this process is so quick that it’s imperceptible. If your page is complex or the user is located far away from your server, however, it can take a few seconds. Caching’ is a way to cut down on loading time by saving versions of your site that browsers can access more quickly.

Caching can be a complicated issue, and it occurs in different ways. By using plugins, however, it can be readily applied without requiring any technical configuration. WordPress users might want to switch to WP Super Cache for this purpose:

BigTinyDesigns WP Ssuper Cache

4. Connect Your Site to a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Technically, this technique is an extension of the last one. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a large-scale way to cache your website, and can be extremely effective.

A CDN is a network of servers, usually spread out across the world. Copies of your site will be stored on each server. When a visitor accesses one of its pages, the necessary data will be transferred from the server that’s located closest to them geographically.

This can cut down a lot on loading times because you don’t have to travel as far as your site’s data. In addition, many CDNs give extra characteristics to boost performance. Cloudflare is a perfect (and popular) example: The Cloudflare CDN service.

BigTinyDesigns Cloudflare Website

It has 180 data centers located all over the globe, which gives your website a massive reach, and it provides plenty of performance and security options. Plus, setting it up on your site is simple.

5. Upgrade Your Hosting Plan as Needed

It’s possible that you may try all the strategies listed above, but still see lower page speeds than you’d like. This is especially common if your site has grown a lot lately and is bigger in scale, or receiving more visitors than it used to.

In that scenario, consistent performance issues may simply indicate that you’ve outgrown your current hosting plan. If you choose your hosting provider carefully, you should find maintaining fast loading speeds a lot simpler. However, lower-tier plans sometimes don’t provide the resources your site needs to run smoothly.

If you began out on a fundamental mutual hosting plan like many website owners, you might want to consider upgrading to a hosting plan for Virtual Private Server (VPS):

Ask BigTinyDesigns for HOSTING SERVER OPTIONS and prices

This will provide you with more resources and a more scalable architecture–both of which help to maintain top-notch performance. You can also consider a managed WordPress hosting plan, which costs a bit more but means that your provider will handle a lot of crucial performance-related tasks for you.

Conclusion

Performance is something that you need to keep in mind throughout the entire lifespan of your site. A site that loads one day quickly can become sluggish as it expands and becomes more common over time. Therefore, testing the efficiency of your site frequently is essential, and doing all you can to keep quick loading speeds.

Five of WordPress ‘ best ways to do this include:

1. Keep up to date with your WordPress version

2. Optimize images of your website

3. Implement a caching solution

4. Connect Your Site to a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

5. Upgrade Your Hosting Plan as Needed