It’s no denying that WordPress is one of the best CMS platforms around to build your blog or website. Unfortunately, one of the major flaws of WordPress is that they tend to make your site slow and sluggish.

A sluggish and slow loading website is one of the key factors that will cause you to lose out on potential subscribers, readers, and even business. If you don’t want your current (and potential) user base to suffer from a slow website, then read up on the 5 tips that you can use to improve your WordPress website speed.

Why WordPress website speed matters

Before we get into the tips and tricks for improving your WordPress website speed, let’s go over the reasons why it’s important that your website be constantly fast loading:

• With a fast-loading website, you’ll be ranked better and higher on search engines (like the almighty Google) compared to the slow-loading ones. Improving your site’s speed will directly improve your website’s position in SERPs, so it should be a priority.
• Plenty of research has shown that if a site takes more than 2 seconds to load, it will result in a 47% increase in bounce rate. If you want to keep half of your visitors from leaving your website, you better make sure it loads fast to keep them interested.
• For an eCommerce store, having a fast loading site is absolutely important if you want to be profitable. Online shoppers are an impatient bunch so if the checkout page doesn’t load instantly, you’re at risk of losing a potential sale.

So it’s clear that having a slow loading WordPress site can have huge ramifications. But, what can you do to actually improve your site’s speed?

Tip #1: Choose a host that works best

One of the biggest factors that affect a website’s speed is the hosting company you choose for your WordPress website. There are plenty of web hosting company available today but you need to filter the best web host for WordPress.

You need to understand how a shared hosting server differs from a cloud or dedicated hosting server. You must figure out which one fits best your website needs and requirements while still keeping your site’s speed and most importantly, your budget.

Generally, it’s better to opt for s dedicated server hosting as they provide better speeds and performance, however, they can be expensive and harder to maintain. A more affordable choice is to go for cloud hosting which is an upgrade in terms speed and stability from shared hosting but not as expensive as dedicated server hosting.

Tip #2: Use a caching plugin

The idea of caching is to download your website’s data on a user’s temporary storage drive so that the next time they visit, it will load faster, as they would have all the data needed for your website already.

With WordPress, you can install plugins to use caching on your website and drastically improve your overall page load times. And the best part? All of them are free and easy to use on WordPress.

One particular plugin that we recommend is the W3 Total Cache for WordPress. Not only do they provide all the features that you’ll need, it’s also extremely easy to use and learn. Simply install and activate, then you’re on way to making your website faster!

Tip #3: Consider using a CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) is a tool that basically takes all of your static files (images, CSS, javascript, etc.) from your site and allows visitors to download them as fast as possible by uploading the files on servers that are nearby to the user.

There are a number of premiums CDNs available such as MaxCDN, Amazon S3, or KeyCDN, that are reasonably priced and are fairly straightforward to use (though you might want to check on a few video tutorials first). If you prefer something less expensive, you can explore CloudFlare, a popular free CDN for WordPress users. It’s one of the few industry-leading players with over 100,000 active websites installed.

Tip #4: Optimize all your images

A general rule of thumb for images is to keep the files small, but not too small that it sacrifices image quality.  It’s best to optimize all images before you upload them with image resizing tools on the web. However,  if you were to resize and optimize every single image, it can be a lot of work and incredibly time-consuming.

Thankfully, WordPress has an amazing free plugin called WP-SmushIt that will resize and optimize all your images automatically as you upload them all to your website. It’s definitely a plugin worth installing!

Tip #5: Optimize your overall homepage

You might not realize this but odds are, there are a number of things on your homepage that you can do to improve its overall loading speed. And it’s important that your homepage loads up smoothly as it is the page that people will be landing on the most often.

WordPress by default will show the full content of each post on your homepage. This means it will make your homepage, tags, categories, archives and others to load slower. To speed things up, you need to set your site to display excerpts instead of the full content.

Some of the things that you can do to optimize your homepage are:

• Remove any unnecessary widgets on the homepage.
• Keep the design minimal on your homepage! Don’t clout your site with 8,000 widgets when your readers just want to read your content.
• Make it lightweight. Try to avoid being image heavy and use minimalistic designs/themes

A cleaner and focused homepage not only helps your website load faster but also keeps it looking good to your visitors as well!

Conclusion

When you start implementing the tips we’ve outlined for WordPress, then hopefully you’ll see a noticeable improvement in the overall speed and performance of your website. Once you’ve got your website up to speed, then it’s time to read up on how you can make money with your blog or how to make your visitors stay longer on your blog!