11 Simple Hacks To Increase WordPress Site Speed

Don’t you wanna increase WordPress site speed? Don’t you think website speed is a great deal?

A lot of people would make the same mistake.

If a page lags by one second, the following happens:

Pages viewed by 11% fewer people
A 16% drop in customer satisfaction
Conversions decreased by 7%

It will negatively affect your ability to engage visitors and make sales if your site takes too long to load.

It can’t be avoided.

Faster sites score well with Google, but they also provide higher profits for the bottom line of your business.

The Impact of Website Speed Optimization on Conversions

Conversions are destroyed by slow sites.

According to 47% of consumers, websites should load in two seconds or less. Three-second pages will lose 40% of the visitors.

Almost half of your visitors will leave your site before it has even loaded in three seconds if it takes more than three seconds.

Your reading is correct.

You will lose a lot of potential conversions just from that. Even the visitors who stay can be discouraged from returning if the pages load slowly.

An online survey found that 79% of customers would not return to a site that performed poorly. During the same survey, 44% of shoppers reported that poor experiences with sites led to them not telling their friends about them.

According to this study, a one-second delay can also reduce customer satisfaction by 16%.

Why Does Your WordPress Website Take So Long To Load?

There will likely be several recommendations for improvement in your speed test report. Beginners often struggle with understanding technical jargon.

The key to improving website performance is learning what slows it down and making smarter long-term decisions.

WordPress websites that run slowly are caused by:

Web Hosting – An incorrectly configured web hosting server may slow down your website.
WordPress Configuration – Overloaded servers result in slower websites, while cached versions cause your website to crash.
Page Size – Mostly poor optimization of images.
Bad Plugins – You can severely slow down the performance of your website if you are using a poorly coded plugin.
External scripts: ad codes, font loaders, etc. can also negatively affect the performance of your site.

Let’s take a look at how to speed up your WordPress website now that you know what slows it down.

The Importance of Good WordPress Hosting

The performance of your WordPress website is dependent on your hosting service. A good shared hosting provider like Bluehost will optimize your website for performance.

With shared hosting, however, you share server resources with many other customers. As a result, if your neighboring site gets a lot of traffic, then it will affect the server performance, slowing down your site.

However, you can also use a Managed WordPress Hosting service if you want the latest optimized server configuration for running WordPress. Hosting companies that provide managed WordPress hosting also offer automatic backups, automatic updates, and more advanced security settings to keep your site safe.

Rocket.net Hosting is our preferred managed WordPress hosting provider. The company is also the most popular one in the industry.

How To Increase WordPress Site Speed

You have learned how a slow website can impact your conversions and what are the reasons that are slowing down your site. Now let’s learn how to increase WordPress site speed with just simple hacks. 

Without further ado, let’s land on the straight solution-

1. Invest In A High-Quality WordPress Hosting

You should choose your Hosting provider carefully if you want a Super Fast site. Your Web-hosting choice can benefit you in many ways.

With a fast site, you’ll have fewer downtimes, etc. It’s almost certain that your website is losing customers, sales, and revenue if you use a cheap quality hosting service.  Make sure you don’t sacrifice quality for savings.

Now is the time to pay a few bucks and get a better host. Now is the time to switch Web Hosts! 

Hosting	Best Use For	Visit
Bluehost	Micro niche & affiliate marketing blog	Visit here
Rocket.net	Heavy authority website	Visit Here

These two hosting providers can help you to increase WordPress site speed amazingly. If you are already using them make sure, you have done the following tasks also.

2. Choose Your Theme Wisely

WordPress has thousands of themes to choose from, which is one of its best features.

There is a wide selection of themes available. If you want a premium theme and framework, you can either choose a free theme or pay a few dollars.

My recommendation is to use a premium theme. Despite having hundreds of features, premium themes are optimized for speed. Some are not top-notch, of course. Choosing wisely is therefore crucial.

While picking a theme, you should be concerned with three things: responsiveness, functionality, and lightweights. Learn How to choose a perfect WordPress Theme.

The Kadence theme is working great on FacileWay. This theme comes with amazing blocks that will help you to build a fast website without any heavy website builders.

Read also: GeneratePress Black Friday Deal-Save $30 on all Plans

3. Use an Effective Caching Plugin

Using data from previous requests in order to speed up future requests is called caching.

Every time you visit your blog, WordPress loads dozens of files. This process becomes simpler with caching. WordPress won’t have to do much and load a lot on the backend.

By enabling caching, your contents are served instead of having to be generated repeatedly. Visitors returning to a website can benefit greatly from caching. WordPress plugins can be used to enable caching to increase WordPress site speed.

Now, there are a lot of options to choose from. Nevertheless, I recommend LiteSpeed Cache. The plugin has all the features you need in a caching plugin. Installing and using it is simple.

If you are looking for a premium one, WP Rocket is highly recommended. You can wait for WP Rocket Black Friday to save money on this premium plugin or Grab it Now! [$49/Year]

According to Siddhit’s comment, if your website is hosted in shared or any you must know if your host provider is using listserver or not if yes “Make sure to download the plugin of listservers so both websites via wp rocket or any other and server can be cache via Lite server, This will instantly boost the server and web pages.

 4. Use a Content Delivery Network

The content delivery network comprises servers spread across several data centers. With a CDN, your content, images, CSS, and JavaScript files can be delivered from various locations worldwide.

The CDN will serve your blog’s content from the closest location to your visitors. By doing so, your blog is served quickly and increases WordPress site speed dramatically.

CDNs are available in both premium and free versions. Those who have high-traffic blogs may want to consider a CDN service such as MaxCDN. You can choose a free one, to begin with.

5. Optimize Images

A blog post is incomplete without images. It’s rare to see a blog post without an image. Would that slow down the load time of your blogs? Since they are bigger than JavaScripts or stylesheets, they will load slower.

So you want them to load quickly by reducing their size. That can be accomplished by resizing or re-formatting the images, but it may compromise the quality.

Wouldn’t it be great if it were possible to reduce the size of an image without losing quality? I know, right?

I am using the WP Smush It plugin to optimize my images. If you can optimize your images properly with the proper tool, it can increase WordPress site speed insanely.

6. Reduce the number of Plugins

You can get all kinds of features in your blog using WordPress plugins. Overusing them will slow your blog down.

Not every plugin is essential for your blog. Decide which plugins are essential for your blog by going through the entire plugin list.

There will probably be a few in your list which is not important, but you have them activated. Delete them once they are deactivated. It is still possible to encounter security vulnerabilities when you have plugins deactivated.

Make sure you choose only the plugins you need for your blog and use only the ones you need. Keep them updated on a regular basis to increase WordPress site speed.

7. Keep WordPress updated

WordPress should always be updated.  It becomes more efficient and secure with every WordPress update. There are also new features.

The best performance comes from keeping your WordPress updated. Remember to make a backup of your website before updating.

8. Use Excerpts on the Homepage and Archives

When you view your homepage or archives, WordPress displays the full content of each article. You can expect these pages to load slower, including your homepage, categories, tags, and other archive pages.

Besides not feeling the need to visit the article itself, showing full articles on these pages can also be detrimental to the user experience. Your site’s page views and user time could be affected as a result.

If you prefer to display excerpts rather than full content on archive pages, you can set up your site to do so.

The settings for reading are under Settings » Reading. Select “Show: Exrept” rather than “Full Text” for each article to increase WordPress site speed.

9. Use Lazy Loading if Needed

Blog posts with many images, multiple videos embedded, and photo galleries can benefit from lazy loading.

By using lazy loading, only the images and videos visible to the user will be downloaded at once. A placeholder image replaces all other images and video embeds.

The viewer’s browser now displays images as they scroll down your website. Besides images and videos, you can lazy load WordPress comments and Gravatars as well.

You can use WP Rocket Plugin to use lazy loading. 

10. Use the Latest PHP Version

This WordPress blogging platform is primarily based on PHP. Server-side languages run on the server, so they’re installed and run on your hosting account.

On their servers, all good WordPress hosting companies use the most stable PHP version. Your hosting company may, however, be running an older version of PHP.

In comparison to PHP 6, PHP 7 is about two times faster. Your website should take advantage of this huge performance boost.

Install and activate the Version Info plugin to find out which PHP version your website runs on.

Your PHP version will appear in the footer of your admin dashboard after activating the plugin.

11. Limit Post Revisions

WordPress’s database is occupied by post revisions. Plugins can also be affected by revisions, according to some users. By searching through them unnecessarily if the plugin doesn’t specifically exclude post revisions, it might slow down your site.

There is an easy way to restrict how many revisions WordPress keeps for each article. Put the following code in the wp-config.php file.

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 4 );

By using this code, WordPress will only save your last four revisions of each post or page and automatically discard older revisions.

Conclusion

If you lower your website’s loading time, you will be able to greatly improve your visitors’ experience. Both mobile devices and desktops are used in the same way. It will also help you rank higher in the SERPs.

In the long run, reducing bandwidth usage on your hosting server and providing faster site loading speed for your clients can only be beneficial for you.

For those of you who haven’t already set up a blog, see how to do it on WordPress. A great resource for building a personal or professional blog, this site offers step-by-step tutorials.

I hope now you know how to increase WordPress site speed. Please feel free to share with your friends and let them know how they can increase their WordPress site speed using these simple hacks.