You’ve built your website and filled it with high-quality images and videos, but this media content is slowing down your WordPress site speed. What should you do? Whether you are running a blog, an e-commerce store, or a business website on WordPress, having a fast and reliable website is crucial for providing a great user experience and driving more traffic and conversions. If you’re looking to improve the performance of your WordPress website, these tips will help you!
Optimize images and videos
Images are a crucial part of any website, but they can also slow down your site’s loading time if they are not properly optimized. Image compression plugins for WordPress can help you reduce the file size of your images without compromising their quality. You should also ensure that your images are in the optimum format – JPEGs for photographs, PNGs for graphics and logos – and modern image formats like WebP and AVIF that are much smaller in size (26% smaller WebP as compared to JPEGs).
What about videos? Nowadays, in order to deliver a seamless digital experience, videos are key interactive elements. But these can also mean slow load times when not optimized, especially if you are hosting them directly on your site. Video transcoding and adaptive streaming technologies are exceptionally useful to ensure that your video loads quickly according to your user’s internet speeds.
Minify your codes
Your website’s code can have a significant impact on its speed and performance. Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters and codes like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files from your website’s code to reduce its size and improve loading times.
Choose the right plugins
One danger of WordPress is that even though it is so user-friendly for non-technical users, adding different plugins for different functionalities can quickly add up. To ensure that your plugins are not affecting your website’s speed, you should regularly review and remove any plugins that you no longer need. Plugins that can do more than just one function to improve your web performance, are well-maintained and are regularly updated, should be selected as these are more likely to be optimized for speed and performance.
Use CDNs
A CDN is a network of servers located in different geographical locations that work together to deliver content to end-users more quickly and efficiently. With a CDN, your website’s content is cached on servers located closer to your website’s visitors. This means that whether your users visit your website from Europe or from the United States, the content can be delivered more quickly, resulting in faster page load times.
Furthermore, your web content is distributed across multiple servers with a CDN, which means that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If one server goes down, the others can continue to deliver your website’s content, ensuring that there isn’t any downtime. This is especially useful if you are a new startup, individual business, building up your brand reputation. A website that routinely fails may result in your customers leaving forever!
Festive sales and high-key online traffic timings will no longer be a problem too when you use a CDN for your WordPress site. When your website’s content is delivered through a CDN, it spreads it out and reduces the load on your website’s server. This means that your website will be able to handle more traffic without slowing down or crashing.
Monitor Your Website’s Performance
Lastly, after all those tips, it is important to regularly check your web performance to ensure that it is running smoothly. Tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights can help to analyze your website’s speed and identify any areas for improvement. This can help you to identify any issues before they affect your users, and ensure that your website is always performing at its best.
Conclusion
With these 5 expert tips, you can significantly improve your WordPress website’s speed and performance, providing your users with a better experience and of course, boost your search engine rankings.