Are you wondering why your WordPress site is slow? You're not alone. Many WordPress users experience slow loading times, and it can be a major issue for your website. Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to speed up your WordPress site. In this article, we'll discuss the big factors that can make WordPress slow, how to optimize images for faster loading times, and how to use caching and other performance best practices to improve your website's speed.
Using a slow WordPress theme is one of the biggest factors that can make your website slow. If you're using a theme that's not optimized for speed, it can take longer for your pages to load. It's also important to implement general performance best practices such as compression and caching. Having too many scripts running in the background can also slow down your website.
The number one factor when it comes to speeding up WordPress is the hosting provider you use. If your host has slow servers and outdated technology, you'll never reach those fast loading speeds. You can use tools such as GTmetrix or Pingdom to get data on the 10 rules by which they will judge your website. This includes server response time, page redirects, optimized images, and other rules that only a coding expert or WordPress user would be familiar with. What is a good website without good images? However, size does matter.
While a 5000-pixel by 3000-pixel image is great for framing, it's horrible for your website. Make sure the width and height of your images are optimized for the device they're being viewed on. Keep in mind that most desktop screens are 1920 pixels wide and mobile screens are typically no more than 700 pixels wide. Now that the image has the correct width and height, make sure it also has the correct file size. DPI stands for “dots per inch” and is a good way to reduce image size.
While a DPI of 300 is fine for many images to be printed, it is excessive for most screens, especially for mobile devices. A DPI of 72 is quite standard for web publishing and can optimize image loading time. Another factor that can slow down your website is page redirects. These URLs can point to a dead page or to a red page called “301 permanently moved” or “302 found”. Basically, this means that your server must go to these pages before they go to the real one, a task that accumulates load time.
There are many solutions to this type of problem, such as manually editing external links, deleting old pages, adding better redirect code or even recovering these pages. Finally, make sure your website is secure and loading in less than 1 second. People not only expect speed but also make decisions at lightning speed. Did you know that it takes less than 3 seconds for a person to decide if they like your website? So if you want people to stay and buy your service, you better not waste those precious 3 seconds on a slow loading site. Ah themes, I love nothing more than trying new WordPress themes, seeing what it looks and feels like working with them. However, if you don't follow WordPress redirection best practices, you can have a negative impact on your site's user experience and search engine optimization (SEO).
WPX is so confident that the steps they have implemented to protect their servers and website will be more than enough, that they offer free malware removal if your site is hacked. It tracks and analyzes slow transactions, database queries, external requests, WordPress hooks, plugins, etc. If you're updating a website with new posts and pages, there are likely to be changes to your URL structure. To keep your WordPress site running at an optimal speed, you should regularly get rid of all the unnecessary clutter from your database. Usually managed WordPress hosting comes with multiple features to help make WordPress sites work efficiently, securely and quickly.Google Cloud C2: Kinsta and WP Engine are the only main hosts using Google Cloud C2 which are faster than SiteGround's Google Cloud N2 machines. Instead of doing all the work yourself, you can also hand over your performance reports to a trusted support team so they can optimize your website. A common tip you'll see on the web is that if you want a high-performance site you should run your site on a VPS but this isn't necessarily a good idea.
Just like with WooCommerce you can use it to find performance issues with WordPress multisite membership sites and LMS sites. Having a website with the latest theme & plugin updates is a necessity nowadays as bugs and security loopholes are found and connected almost daily. Not necessarily BUT some features such as support for the HTTP2 protocol and free HTTPS certificates are standard today on good hosts and are really important for a fast-loading website. This is especially important for older sites: make an inventory of the add-ons you're using and disable or delete the ones you're no longer using. According to the HTTP file (March 1 2002) the average page weight of a WordPress site is 2408 KB of which images account for almost 1117 KB (46 38% of total page weight).W3 Total Cache is free so it's a great alternative to WP Rocket BUT it's very technical to set up so it's probably not ideal for the DIYer Unless you know what you're doing there's a reasonable chance you'll break your site.
