How do I make my WordPress website faster?

by | Apr 16, 2021 | SEO, WordPress

Smaller websites created on WordPress may not face the issue of speed as much as heavy e-commerce and major news/blog websites do. But even your smaller website can load slow, what makes your WordPress website slow?

Here are a few recommendations to make your WordPress website faster:

A good host

Going for free hosting may sound better when you are on a low budget, but paying for hosting will always make sure you get the best hosting services. Do you research, are most (if not all) of your customers in Australia? Use an Australian host.

psst… I’m an Australian website host, my servers are located in Sydney.

A solid framework / theme

Not all themes are designed to work well with the nature of your business. There are separate designs for all kinds of websites created on WordPress. Themes designed for blogs and business or e-commerce websites not only look different, but they also perform differently. Choosing the correct theme will help speed up your site as you wont be loading unnecessary parts that won’t be utilised.

A simple homepage

A website’s home page is the first to come into the view of a visitor. It should not only look aesthetically appealing, but it should also be as simple as possible in terms of content.

Here are a few strategies to keep your WordPress website home page as simple as possible:

  • Don’t add too many widgets on your home page.
  • Don’t add social media sharing widgets everywhere. The best practice is to include these on sub-pages, such as product pages or blog post pages so that the product or post can be shared directly.
  • Show only a few posts or products on the home page.

Choose faster plugins

Decide which plugins you actually require and if any unnecessary plugins are clogging your WordPress website, remove them immediately. Some free plugins can be left to go out of date, not only dangerous and a way that hackers may access your site, they can also slow your site down. Using out of date technology or conflicting with newer plugins and code. For example, a plugin to play music would not make sense on a website that is designed for e-commerce.

Optimise your database

Posting back to back on a single day does not necessarily mean that more visitors or views will come in. In some cases, having a lot of published posts does get in views, but this doesn’t have to be made every single day or too frequently, this will often translate to spam in the eyes of the all mighty Google.

Optimise your images

This is particularly true for e-commerce WordPress websites as handling product catalogues can get out of hand. Using an image optimiser like Smush or Optimus can reduce the file size of the images. Usually these image optimisation plugins can be set to automate.

Lazy load your images

If your WordPress website has a lot of images, then you can manage the way they load. Usually, a website becomes heavy due to excessive videos and images. This affects the loading time of the page and may cause your customers to leave your website because nobody likes to wait. If you enable lazy load, images that are further down the webpage are loaded only when the website visitor scrolls down.

Use static HTML

For web pages that don’t have dynamic content such as embed videos, use the static HTML format instead. Most Cache plugins will help you do this.

To wrap up

If you follow these simple strategies, then your WordPress Website will become faster.

If you don’t have the time or the skills to speed up your won website, get in touch. and talk to Ben.