WordPress is the widely used powerful CMS and owns nearly 60% of market share across the globe helps to drive a range of business solutions and ensure digital transformation. But if your site performance is slower, then you may lose your potential visitors as people often leave your site when your site slows down and takes more time than usual to load. Especially when it comes to an eCommerce site, your site speed matters a lot even a one-second delay may become a reason for customer diversion.

Faster sites get more traffic, more visitors, and generate more revenue streams. Most of the successful companies keep this concern on high priority to remain competitive and to obtain higher returns and higher business values. Even most of the brands are considering this concern from the very initial stage as they have started raising a query to their WordPress development services provider whether they will speed up their WordPress site.

As per research – 53 % of mobile visitors abandon your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds load times and nearly 10% of visitors ensure bouncing after 2 seconds of browsing. Such facts demonstrate how every second count can impact on your business strategies. Meanwhile, Google stated that page speed performance is a ranking factor of search results.

Now, let us know how to check your WordPress performance or speed. To check your site load time, you can leverage tools like isitwp, Pingdom, GTmetrix, Google Mobile Speed Test, and more. These tools will help you to know your exact WordPress site performance or load time. 

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Before we begin, first test your site’s current speed and then start implementing the tactics we are going to share in this blog. So, let’s unfold those effective ways to optimize your WordPress site performance.

Use Latest Version Of PHP

WordPress is written in PHP language and is a  server-side language that runs on your hosting server. As most of the good hosting service providers use the latest PHP version on their servers to ensure better performance, but there is a possibility that your hosting provider is using a slightly previous version of PHP. 

To know the current PHP version of your site, you need to install and activate the ‘Version Info’ plugin, this will show your PHP version in the footer section of your site’s admin dashboard. If it demonstrates the lower version as the latest version is PHP-7, you need to ask your hosting provider to upgrade it for you. If they can’t do so, then there is a genuine need to switch your hosting provider.

Choose A Quality Hosting-Service Provider

Choosing a quality hosting provider can be a proven milestone for brands seeking to augment their WordPress performance. Out of the available good hosting providers, going with Bluehost, Hostgator, Siteground, Godaddy, and more can provide you extra mileage to optimize your WordPress site.

Moreover, if you are using shared hosting and your neighboring site is acquiring large traffic then there is a possibility of slowing down your site. So, make sure that you are using managed WordPress hosting that eliminates such issues and provides you the optimized server configurations to ensure the smoother running of your website. With managed WordPress hosting, you are offered more bolstering functionalities like automatic backups, automatic WordPress updates, and advanced security configurations to ensure your site protection.

Pick Light-Weight Fast Loading Theme

Leveraging an old WordPress theme especially designed prior to 2016 may not help you to improve your site performance. It’s time to change your web theme as in recent years many themes are designed to ensure faster loading. Also, customizing your theme with a multitude of dynamic elements with higher page sizes can ruin your site experience too.

Also, make sure that you are using a highly responsive theme to serve a greater experience to your users across devices. Out of the available themes in the market, Astra, GeneratePress, OceanWP, etc. are the market leaders. Hence, make a strategic decision while choosing a theme to improve your overall WordPress site loading.

Optimize Your Image

Images are used to improve the visual appearance of your site but if you are using too many images in your webpage, blog, or article, it may downgrade the loading speed of your pages. So, make sure you are using relevant images merely to illustrate your content flow. Rest, do not forget to reduce the image sizes you are integrating in your web pages.

To optimize your images, you can either ask your designer to reduce the image size without compromising with the quality of the images or you can leverage the extensions or plugins to optimize your image. Moreover, image compression and image lazy loading are the other methods to be used especially for those who are running an image-intensive website.

Ensure Using CDN

Obviously, you may have visitors from different geo-locations and you are hosting your site on a particular geo-location. Now, what happens! Your website loading speed will be different for your audience located in different regions far away from your hosted location. Thus, the hosted location of your hosting servers impacts your website loading performance.

To overcome this issue, you can use CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDN helps brands to maintain the minimum site loading speed for your visitors from every geo-location as it keeps your web copy in numerous data centers located in different locations. You can make a smarter choice by choosing the CDN services from the most popular CDN services providers like Cloudflare and MaxCDN.

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Use Least Plugins

Plugins empower your site with all the required functionality and when you do plugin stuffing, it may harm your web performance as it increases the size and efforts of your backup. So, evaluate things and figure out the essential plugins that you need for your distinct business context and remove the unnecessary plugins.

Also, clean up your database on a regular basis and pay attention to the cache plugin.  This will help you boost your WordPress loading speed. Moreover, consider custom coding to acquire customized functionality for your website. This will minimize the load of your site. You can also take recourse of other third-party solutions to carry out scheduling and automation.

Optimize Your Database

While using WordPress, your site gets filled with a multitude of data such as unused plugins or themes, spams, fake users, drafts with old contents. All these elements lower your WordPress speed. Deleting such data on a steady basis helps to reduce the size of your WordPress backup and will help you speed up your site.

To optimize your database, you can also make effective use of the WP-Sweep plugin. This plugin helps to delete your unused and unnecessary data encompassing trash posts, unused tags, revisions, draft data, spam data, and more with just a single click. If you need someone who can do this all for you whether for your WordPress app or website, outsource WordPress development services from a reputed WordPress development company.

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Conclusion

It’s vital to lower your WordPress site loading time indeed as it helps enterprises to boost their visitors’ experience, optimize ranking in the SERPs, and creates upcoming business opportunities. To implement these best practices, you can do it with few technical expertise and can hire a WordPress development company for a hassle-free solution.