In this WordPress tutorial, we have now learned how to install and use WordPress in order to create and manage your very own website. As your WordPress site grows, so does the amount of text, images, code and other media files. A bigger website means that it will take longer to load. To avoid slow response time in WordPress, you should also invest some time in optimization. It will ensure that your pages load quickly and efficiently, thus, leaving your visitors happy and wanting to come back for more. Everyone has encountered a slow website at least a few times and felt the frustration that comes while waiting endlessly for it to load. Taking that into account, spending some time to improve your WordPress speed is a really good idea. The best part about WordPress is that it’s really easy to optimize due to the number of plugins and other tools available. You can make your WordPress site lightning fast without even having any coding knowledge at all. To get you on the right track, we will cover a few WordPress optimization techniques that will provide a notable speed boost to your website.
Using WordPress Caching Plugins
The first step in optimizing your WordPress site is setting up a WordPress caching plugin. Is short, a cache is a temporary data storage. In most cases, active data is cached which results in reduced loading times. For example, when you access a frequently visited site, your browser will have a portion of the site’s static content located in its cache. As a result, the browser needs to request fewer files and information from the server which ultimately leads to quicker loading. WordPress caching plugins work by creating a static version of your website and delivering it, instead of loading all PHP scripts every time when someone refreshes or re-enters your site.
Most popular WordPress caching plugins are:
WP Super Cache
W3 Total Cache
WP Fastest Cache
Optimizing WordPress Images
Image optimization is another crucial task that should be done in order to make your WordPress site fast. Generally, there are 2 main issues that cause images to load slowly:
• Using too large images. For example, you upload a 500 x 500 dimension picture but your site resizes it to 100 x 100. As a result, the visitor’s browser will have to download the larger file first, scale it down and only then display it. The proper way would be to simply upload a 100 x 100 dimension picture so that the excessive task of scaling down the image would be avoided. The image would also take up less space that way, resulting in an overall boost of speed.
• Images are not fully compressed. You can save lots of space and bandwidth by properly compressing your images. Luckily, WordPress has a really great plugin that can help you with that, it’s called WP Smush.
The more images your WordPress site has, the more beneficial this optimization task will be.
