How to Improve the Speed of Your WordPress Website

Loading speed, responsiveness, and the use of lightweight assets are backbones of
successful websites – if you have a slow WordPress website, not only users have
to wait around for seconds after each interaction with your site (which will
quickly get annoying and encourage them to visit other sites), but it will
reduce organic traffic from search engine and social media as they punish slow
and badly coded websites. That’s why improving the speed of your WordPress
website is one of the biggest improvements you can make to improve your site’s
metrics. This article will help you learn a few actionable ways you can take
right now to immensely improve the speed of your website and make it more
responsive.

#1 Identify What’s
Slowing Down Your Website

How are you going to improve your site’s speed if you don’t identify what’s slowing
it down first? Thankfully, there are multiple tools you can use to identify
both page-level and site-wide issues slowing down your WordPress website.

The most popular of these tools is the Google PageSpeed tool that analyzes a particular page and provides actionable ways for you to work on. There are other free and paid network monitoring tools like WebpageTest, MaxCDNTools, etc. you can use to complement PageSpeed.

#2 Compress and
Minify Your Site’s Assets

Almost always, when a website is excessively slow, it is because it uses large assets
that take a lot of bandwidth and time to download. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript,
the main building blocks of websites, are all just plain text and they take
almost no bandwidth loading and minimal processing power for the browser to
decipher, but it is the images, animations, sounds, videos, and icons that take
a disproportionate amount of time to decipher and load.

That’s why you can expect to cut loading speeds in half by only minimizing the assets.
Thankfully, not only there are websites that you can upload your assets to and
automatically receive minified versions of them, but there are plugins you can
install that automatically identify and compress the assets you use on your
website.

Although we recognize that some designs don’t lend themselves to compressions, and in
those cases, implementing a whole new design might be the only viable choice.
Thankfully, there are services like https://acclaim.agency/sketch-to-html-service
that can help you!

#3 Change Hosting

Sometimes, the problem isn’t with the website itself, but it is with the host – sadly,
there are thousands of low-quality WordPress hosts out there. They provide slow
bandwidth, resulting in the website being down often, and fail to serve certain
geographical locations completely.

Thankfully, migrating to a new host is hardly difficult – most high-end hosts provide
migration tools to help make your job much easier. While you might’ve started
with a cheap bad host at the start, you most likely need to move to a new
better host as your website grows.

#4 Remove
Unnecessary Bloat

You need to make sure you always maintain your WordPress website and remove
unnecessary bloat, and WordPress bloat includes many things:

• Code bloat: coding standards change all the time –
  methods/functions get deprecated and new, more efficient versions are added.
  You need to maintain your website with the best coding practices.
• Theme and Plugin bloat: installing many
  unnecessary plugins when developing and testing a WordPress website is
  commonplace, but when your website enters production and is ready to serve
  users, you should delete these unnecessary plugins.
• Content
  bloat: remove articles, landing pages, and blogs that your website doesn’t need
  or benefit from anymore. It is only natural to change and update your website’s
  content, but make sure you delete or archive the old content.